After experiencing unprecedented curbs on liberty over the past 20 months, citizens across the country are naturally anxious and upset.
Happy to be free but not satisfied, because in some States mandatory inoculations are still being proposed, and/or legislated.
Since the lockdowns ended, many days have seen the streets filled with protesters shouting ‘freedom’ and loudly voicing their objections to inoculations. However, these protests are misdirected.
What they are demanding is not freedom, but license to kill. Anyone not immunized remains a danger to their family, their friends, their co-workers and to the public at large.
They have the right to resist inoculation, but they have no right to be part of a society in which everyone but them has taken precautions to avoid the dangers of a transmissible deadly disease.
It is imperative that we do everything possible to mitigate the scourge of Covid 19, as we have done in the past with other contagious diseases. Diseases, that in the mid-19th century killed 50% of children before the age of five, have now been wiped out or controlled through vaccination.
When I was a child, I witnessed the suffering of other children with diseases such as poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, tetanus, and whooping cough. And, indeed, I was victim to some of them.
Vaccinations for smallpox and diphtheria were available by that time, so they were no longer a threat to those of us who were immunized. Vaccines for the others have been discovered since, and it is highly likely that the protesters, and their children, have been inoculated with such vaccines.
Why is Covid 19 any different?
In the 1950’s, when I first travelled overseas, I and everyone else was required to have a vaccination for smallpox, a disease that had killed or disfigured millions of people, including Queen Elizabeth I, for hundreds of years.
Would the current protesters consider that mandate a violation of their rights, or just plain common sense? By 1980, because of worldwide vaccinations, smallpox was completely eradicated. It no longer exists.
My suggestion to protesters is this: If you have doubts about the veracity of Covid information you have received, check out reliable sources such as your health practitioner or the U.S. Department of Health (hhs.gov), or Johns Hopkins University (coronavirus.jhu.edu).
Don’t rely on misinformation from the crazies on such web sites as QAnon who seem hell-bent on perpetrating the world’s greatest hoax
If freedom means so much to you, why don’t you demonstrate for the release of political prisoners in Russia, China, and Turkey? Or march for equality of women, justice before the law, the rights of indigenous peoples, or for fairer wages for teachers, carers and childcare workers?
Unlike your cause, these freedoms could be gained without harm to others.
The principle of freedom is too precious to be wasted upon your petty purpose.