Treating a young person who is critically ill from a preventable illness is particularly heartbreaking. Most are
unvaccinated. While those who are vaccinated are still at risk, they generally have less severe disease.
I worry about how we can get over this wall. Sadly, I fear that only experiencing the disease in themselves or others close to them will be what changes the mind of the unvaccinated. This is a terrible public health strategy.
The Biden Administration’s plan seems to be the only logical step for addressing the persistent
challenge of vaccinating a population thus far reluctant to get immunized. Vaccinations have to be
incorporated as part of normal social behavior to overcome the pervasive problem of hesitancy.
Adding a vaccine requirement helps do this. Just look at the history of the measles vaccine. During the Carter administration, when vaccine mandates were required for school children, vaccination rates in this population
soared to 90% and public health officials saw a clear path towards eradication.
Many skeptics are already
gearing up to oppose the presumed restrictions that mask requirements and vaccine mandates impose. But perhaps they forgot what things were like last summer. It was bad. Hospitals had
shortages of ICU beds. Caregivers faced inadequate personal protective equipment. People
died alone in their hospital rooms.
Lately, I have been feeling a sense of dread as I recall these past experiences. As the world starts creeping back to “normal,” there is something deep, dark, and destructive lingering on the horizon. I hear the
song from Jaws that played just as the shark attacks the unwitting swimmer or diver enjoying their vacation in that big blue ocean.
Maybe I have a flair for the dramatic. But remember, when the pandemic initially hit the United States, it was
reported in just one man in his 30s in January 2020. In March 2020, the former president was concerned that 21 disembarking cruise ship passengers would
cause the number of cases in our country to double. Covid now seems an ubiquitous part of our everyday life with
over 34 million cases and 600,000 deaths. The number of new cases has the potential to rapidly increase, particularly as the Delta variant has
become the predominant strain of Covid now being transmitted in the United States. As one public health expert
announced, Delta is Covid on steroids.
We had it bad last spring. I am simply not ready to go back to how things were. Vaccine mandates and mask requirements make sense to me. Masks help protect us all. Let’s all pitch in to end this pandemic.