There has been a great deal of outcry over policies meant to
curtail the spread of COVID-19 as it is argued that said policies are an
infringement of either natural or constitutionally guaranteed rights. However,
as America’s conservative politicians were found of saying after 9/11, after
the subsequent ‘need’ to wholesale spy on American citizens was revealed,
freedom isn’t free. Have the COVID-19 policies up until now been legal? More
importantly, are they ethical? How much freedom, if any, is it permissible to
curtail in order to stem a pandemic that at least on occasion sees people die?
As of this writing, according to Worldometer, COVID-19 kills
3.4 people per 100 recorded cases. In the U.S. there have been 70 million recorded
cases and 866,000 deaths due to the virus or complications due to the virus,
for a 1.2% mortality rate, a lower overall percentage in the U.S. due to
improved medical facilities. In the U.S. for the unvaccinated, there is a 1-in-85
chance that infection will require serious medical attention. For the
vaccinated, there is an approximate 1-in-10,000 chance of infection leading to
hospitalization. I am leaving out statistics by age, ethnicity, or gender
because they are irrelevant to what follows as a life is precious regardless of
age, ethnicity, or gender. Is this not the case? It is the case; this is what
abortion rights opponents would like us to believe. And, this is the viewpoint
we’re all supposed to tow as a supposedly civilized species. But how civilized
are we, really?
Not just in the U.S. but globally authoritarianism has been
on the rise while at the same time there has never been a greater outcry for
protecting one’s freedoms, usually by those very proponents of
authoritarianism. While we might forgive political extremists for their blatant
hypocrisy – it’s just what they do – there is a more sinister undercurrent of
human psychology at work here. While no reasonable person is denying the virus
that causes COVID-19 exists, makes people sick and occasionally kills people,
what the people protesting for their right to assemble without even the most
basic precautions are essentially saying is that any single person’s right to
behave as they want should not be infringed upon even if that behavior potentially
means someone else might die. In other words, our right to socialize in all the
ways we socialized before the current pandemic should be retained even if there
is a potential for one of the people socializing to die. This is not only (supposedly)
ethically incorrect, but constitutionally incorrect in the U.S. I’ll explain,
but first a quick yet realistic thought experiment
In terms of numbers, let’s suppose there are 1,000 people
attending a concert: there is the potential for anywhere between 12 and 34 of
those people to die from COVID-19 (a scenario made more likely if the audience
members are unvaccinated). Even in a best-case scenario, at least 10 of those
concert-goers are going to require going to the hospital and it would be a safe
bet to say at least one of those 10 people are going to die. The question
becomes this; in order to maintain the freedoms we are accustomed to, like
being in a crowd at a concert, how many people are we willing to let die (with
ourselves being among the potential victims)?
We calculate these kinds of risk-assessment unconsciously all
the time. We do it when we drive our cars, for example. According to Gallup.com,
in the U.S. there are .012 deaths per 100 drivers in the U.S. annually (or
approximately 38,000 driver deaths) in order to preserve every driver’s right
(privilege, really) to drive, with most of these deaths being preventable
seeing how most of them are not mechanically related, meaning, due to driver
error and/or recklessness. In the case of our actual constitutional right to
bear arms in the U.S. there are approximately .0059 homicide related deaths per
100 citizens (or approximately 20,000 citizens a year) according to the CDC.
The number of gun-related deaths goes up into the tens of thousands, of course,
if we factor in suicides and accidents. That aside, in 2021 alone, 68 people
were killed or injured in school shootings [edweek.org]. To be allowed to drive
and own firearms, these appear to be acceptable losses for our rights/freedom
to these things, whatever ‘rights’ or ‘freedom’ means. So, this should probably
be sorted out.
When discussing these alleged rights and freedoms, we are
probably talking mostly about those rights the U.S. Constitution affords, such
as the right to bear arms (and not even have to be in a militia, apparently). Also
afforded or protected are the rights to assembly, the freedom of speech, the
freedom of religion (or not be religious), and importantly, the Ninth Amendment
which states that rights afforded by the Constitution shall not infringe upon
other rights. For most U.S. citizens the U.S. Constitution basically affords the
right to go most anywhere and mostly do whatever we want so long as we don’t
intentionally harm other people, least that be a violation of the Ninth
Amendment. Certainly U.S. citizens have a level of freedom not seen in many
other countries. Only how free are we as U.S. citizens, really? It might be
helpful to think of all the ways in which we are not free and why this is
important.
Let’s start with the First Amendment, which grants citizens
the freedom of speech (among other rights). We are allowed to say whatever we
want. Of course, this isn’t true – Explicit child pornography is not protected
free speech and was ruled illegal by SCOTUS in 1996. Also ruled illegal is
speech that incites violence/bodily harm, defames someone’s character, or tries
to pass off someone else’s copyrighted work as your own, to name a few. The
First Amendment is also supposed to allow us to practice religion as we see fit
as much as protect us against state sponsored religion, only, several states’
laws contend that an atheist cannot hold office. (This is unenforceable
according to the SCOTUS but has not been tested. Also, women have not been
protected from religious zealots in Texas most recently and notably.) When it
comes to the Second Amendment, which is supposed to hypothetically protect us
against a tyrannical government, U.S. citizens can own assault weapons but not
weapons of mass destruction such as a fully functional tank or nuclear weapon, which
a hypothetical tyrannical government would be allowed to have.
We have a number of other federal, state, and local laws
that limit our freedoms as well, and this is mostly for our own protection as
well as the protection of our neighbors of whom it is irrelevant whether you
like them or not. For example, while we don’t have to wear seatbelts,
we can be ticketed for it and that fine will be enforced by a court of law. Also
enforced by the courts is our responsibility to pay taxes; they have to
be paid or we face fines or even jail. In most states, it is considered battery
to spit on another person (without consent). In most states, we cannot marry a
minor or marry multiple people at once. By law, we cannot arbitrarily
discriminate against someone based on sex, race, religion, or national origin. (Yes,
we know, this last one is broken all the time; people of color and women face
gross inequities and mistreatment compared to their white male counterparts.) These
are some of the more obvious ways in which U.S. citizens are not free.
Less obvious freedoms involve the widespread use of social
media. The very people complaining about COVID-19 mandates are the same people
who do not seem to realize that every time they use a search engine, log on to
Facebook or other social media app, algorithms are tracking how the user
behaves in order to keep that user engaged for as long as possible. Siri, Alexa
– any smart devices we own – and the NSA are listening to us all the time.
Everyone knows this. No one disputes the fact that major corporations and tech
companies are doing everything they can to manipulate citizens into doing their
bidding, and they often succeed. Oddly, or maybe I should be saying
‘unsurprisingly,’ no one cares and its never a part of the conversation
regarding freedom(s).
These are but very few examples that are in place to
reign in and control behavior for actors within a society for the safety of
society. It is simply not true that a U.S. citizen can do whatever they
want whenever they want unless they leave the country to become a king or queen
of another country and they don’t use the internet.
What does any of this have to do with COVID-19? If it is not
obvious by now, there is a pandemic affection millions of people, with almost
one million deaths associated with the disease in the U.S. as of this writing.
In order to stop the spread of illness – and possibly death – it was asked of the general population to give
up a small measure of freedom; wear face coverings, stay six feet apart, avoid
large gatherings, and isolate if we felt the slightest bit ill or were in close
proximity to a symptomatic carrier of the virus. It was also asked of the
population to get a vaccine which would limit the number of people getting ill
and more importantly limit the time during which an infected person is
transmitting the virus. And none of this, so far, has become law. None of this
has become law because if the population could not take the simple precautions
first asked of them, making the precautions law would result in a nationwide
riot. In short, Americans could not be asked to save the lives of almost a
million of their fellow countrymen because individual ‘freedom’ is more
important than those other people’s lives. That being the case, as with driving
or being allowed to own firearms, we implicitly consent to acceptable losses. In
actual numbers, for example, 2,462 school-aged children were killed by firearms
in 2017; we consider this an acceptable loss of life so that the right to bear
arms goes on uninfringed. The question is – when do the numbers start becoming
unacceptable before we consider reigning in some freedoms? How do we
arrive at those numbers if those numbers even exist? I ask because for some
rights, it seems like no number will be too high for the U.S.
Concerning gun rights, the number did get too high for
Australia. In 1996, a gunman killed just 35 people at a tourist
destination with a semiautomatic weapon. Their gun laws changed within the following
year and the country did not have another mass shooting until 2018 when 7
people were killed. A similar regard for life can been seen with Australia’s initial
response to the pandemic.
When it was recognized in early 2020 that COVID-19 was going
to be a problem, Australia closed its borders and required citizens returning
home to isolate. The people who were required to quarantine were checked on by
police. Some states and territories closed their borders to each other. Non-essential
services were closed. There was bipartisan unity within the government to deal
with the pandemic. Australia’s measures to protect themselves against COVID-19
was quickly implemented and clearly communicated to the public, resulting in
nearly zero cases through the rest of 2020. Australia ended its zero-COVID-19
strategy in late 2021, citing that it was impossible to suppress the virus
forever, which is probably not true had everyone (globally) initially taken
similar measures. Australia, with its regard for its citizens lives,
understandably wanted their people to return to life as it was before the
pandemic. Unfortunately, they lifted their restrictions too soon, for instance
opening their borders to COVID-19 carriers from less pandemically savvy
nations. Fortunately, with high vaccination rates and occasional snap-lockdowns
and other restrictions, Australia has kept their death toll below 4,000 for the
time being. This is a vast difference from, say, the U.S. even despite the disparities
in population.
It appears death tolls do matter to some nations. In
contrast, the reason the U.S. has been so awful in dealing with COVID-19 has to
do with the fact that compared to many other nations, U.S. citizens simply
don’t care much about each other’s lives. Individual freedom must be maintained
in the face of ridiculously high death tolls even when those numbers are
largely preventable. It does not seem to matter how many people die in car
accidents or are killed by gunfire. Recall that in one incident alone, in the
2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting, 61 people were murdered and 411 injured by
gunfire. The numbers are astounding to everyone but gun rights advocates and
politicians. If that incident did not change the nation’s mood towards the
Second Amendment, we can gather nothing will. There does not seem to be any
sense of national community. So, we should not be surprised that Americans do
not care who they infect or kill by not taking any precautions against
COVID-19.
Why is there no sense of protecting the greater community?
Why do high death tolls that are preventable not matter to U.S. citizens? For
starters, we can blame division on the internet that produces echo chambers for
our worst human qualities, which itself is influenced by the larger tech
companies that puts profits before people. We can also blame foreign regimes
like Russia who have an interest in dividing Americans. The rich, such as the
CEO’s of the afore mentioned tech companies, bear no love for the poor whom,
they don’t seem to realize without, they would not be rich. (Also not a secret
is that the rich and politicians only care about the poor long enough to
exploit them, and this has been going on so long it’s accepted as just another
part of life. My apologies for stating the obvious, which is apparently not
obvious to enough people.) Blame may even lie with the American healthcare
system, which only thinks in terms of dollars, in terms of putting a dollar
sign on life, in terms of how not to pay for the medical care their insurance
is supposed to provide. And, at the root for Americans, there is the false
notion that the U.S. was a country born exclusively out of a need for
individual freedoms to be had, with the nation as a whole to be burned to the
ground should that notion be challenged. This is basically what the psyche of
conservative America has been ever since people of color were allowed to voice
their opinions and speak about their experiences with racism, jeopardizing
white privilege. (To be certain, the current drive in conservative U.S. states
to ban abortion is not because they care about life, rather, they fear being
‘bred out.’) Least we forget as well, history has demonstrated time and again
that as human beings, we just don’t care about people beyond our immediate
tribe(s). It appears frowned upon to say this forthwith, so history says it for
us.
All this adds up to what I’ve come to call, again, ‘acceptable
losses’ which in reality means ‘any amount of loss.’ Any amount of loss is
acceptable to U.S. citizens to maintain their (alleged) absolute freedoms. Had
the Las Vegas gunman in 2017 killed a thousand people, gun rights advocates and
conservative still would not have seen a problem. There is no number of lives
lost that would convince gun rights advocates and conservatives to willingly
curtail their rights.
Realizing this, and out of curiosity, I’ve posed this
question in my Ethics and A&P classes in relationship to COVID-19 or any
other infectious disease: What death toll would be high enough for you to say
we should curtail some freedoms in order to fight a deadly disease? Ebola for
example will kill anywhere from 25% to 90% of the people it infects, allowing
for various factors (with 25% being so low due to how the particular outbreak
was responded to. Otherwise, Ebola’s mortality rate would be closer to at least
50%). Would sacrificing 25% of the population for our basic freedoms be acceptable?
At what point would the death toll be so high it would cause you to say,
“Perhaps we should curtail some freedoms so that there is at least a few people
left to cook and serve me food at the restaurant”? Astonishingly, I’ve been
given figures as low as 20% and as high as 80% of the population.
While this perhaps speaks to an unspoken belief that there are too many people
on the planet (I don’t disagree), I don’t think the people giving me that
figure have thought through the consequences of 20-80% of the population
actually dying. One student did mention that the allowable percentage would be based
upon the freedoms lost, meaning, the more liberties that would be taken away, the
more people we should let die because again, anyone’s possible and even
preventable death does not supersede anyone’s right to liberty. Perhaps
that 20% threshold isn’t being met?
While it can be argued that COVID-19 is not as deadly as
Ebola, Americans have effectively said a loss of 2% of the nation’s population
is perfectly acceptable in order not to have to wear a mask in public. While I
understand wearing a facemask is uncomfortable, few people are willing to let a
surgeon operate on them without one. In other words, if a surgeon can wear a
face mask for several hours straight during surgery, why is the rest of the
population so fragile that they cannot wear a mask in a supermarket for 20
minutes? Why is 20 minutes of someone’s time seen as too much to ask to save
even one person’s life? Because masks and the other precautions aren’t
effective? Then why hasn’t anyone criticized surgeons for wearing masks and
washing their hands prior to surgery before the pandemic?
I can understand vaccine hesitancy
a little more. At the beginning of the rollout even I wanted to see what kind
of side effects there were going to be as I had a bad experience with an
injection in the military. (I had a sudden fever and passed out after a shot.
To this day I do not know what they gave me that caused that reaction.) And, I
can understand being hesitant of the vaccine’s long-term effects. But, I don’t
understand being hesitant about the vaccine’s long-term effects when we do have
a better idea of the long term effects of COVID-19 itself. Nor do I understand
being told someone is worried about the vaccine’s long-term effects or being
afraid of what’s in the vaccines when they are throwing back a Mountain Dew and
a Hershey’s candy bar, as my students often do. There is also what I believe to
be a reasonable suspicion of Big Pharma; while there is much money to be had by
Big Pharma in the case of a pandemic like this, consider the fact that only Big
Pharma had the capability to create a vaccine so quickly. Also, keep in mind
that it does industries such as Big Pharma no good to intentionally kill the
very people who would use their products, so that reasonable suspicion of Big
Pharma only goes so far. At this point, it is a safe assumption that vaccine
hesitancy and resistance is merely towing political lines and there is no
actual valid reasoning against it, not when vaccines have been so effective in
the past. I will not mince words here; it says something unflattering that
almost half the U.S. takes its vaccine advice from a former hippie and Playboy
model. (I’m referring to Jenny McCarthy, who started the anti-vaxxer movement
back in 2007. And no, this is an ad hominin attack as McCarthy had no medical
expertise back then and still doesn’t now.)
Now comes the catch-22: If
vaccines did kill a small percentage of people, how many would be too many? How
many lives lost are worth it to save more lives? Is there an acceptable death
toll for vaccines but not for preventable infections? Hint – the answer is
‘yes’: Vaccines have not killed as many people as COVID-19, so it would make
sense for the population to get vaccinated even if a few people would in fact
die from the vaccine, as long as we’re making this comparison. There is no
logical argument against how unsafe the COVID-19 vaccine might be as the
numbers do not lie. Americans hesitant about vaccines because they’re allegedly
unsafe is an outright hypocrite and again unapologetically towing political
party lines. Getting COVID-19 is clearly more dangerous for everyone if a
person is unvaccinated.
Now that we’ve cleared the air
about what is acceptable in terms of losses, particularly those that are
preventable, what I ask of people who will not take any precautions to stem the
current (and future) pandemic(s) is this: I want to know who the toxic people
are (both figuratively and literally) so I can avoid them. So, be honest and
don’t hide behind rationalizations. Be honest in saying that you simply don’t
care how many people die and that your individual freedom is more important. Be
honest that human life does not matter to you. Be honest that what little is
asked of you to protect human life is too much, that you are easily defeated,
especially by a piece of cloth. But remember, you are the same people who (supposedly)
are for the rule of law, and the rule of law is, at least in the U.S., that
your rights end where mine begin. It’s literally in the Constitution. Read it
from time to time.
