There Are No Morally Acceptable COVID Deaths

No matter how angry we are at the unvaccinated or ‘irresponsible,’ the cause for our suffering is systemic, not personal.

Photo by Brandon Holmes on Unsplash

With cases of the Omicron variant spreading rapidly across the United States and more than 1 in 60 New Yorkers currently testing positive, the Biden Administration is holding firm to its position that the unvaccinated can expect to suffer from illness, hospitalizations, and deaths at worrisome rates in the weeks to come, while the vaccinated may continue gathering and celebrating more or less as usual.

As coordinator of the White House’s COVID response team Jeff Zients put it, unvaccinated Americans are looking at a winter of severe illness and death. As Biden himself put it in a statement made Monday afternoon, Americans should ‘remain vigilant’ against the virus by getting vaccinated and boosted and by wearing masks, but if they have taken all those steps, they have ‘much less reason to worry.’ Here in Illinois, a state lawmaker attempted to pass legislation that would leave unvaccinated people in the state on the hook for all their medical bills, should they get infected.

Of course, both the unvaccinated and vaccinated alike are required to go work and take their children school. Yesterday, the CDC even overturned a previous policy stating unvaccinated students who had been exposed to COVID had to remain home from school for two weeks, regardless of test status, now stating that as long as students test negative twice, they can return. This despite the fact that rapid tests have a failure rate of nearly thirty percent, depending on when in the course of illness a person takes them.

We can expect no lockdowns, Biden says; Fauci doesn’t anticipate recommending them either. Yet we know that cases of Omicron are spreading rapidly among the vaccinated and even some of the boosted; by Biden’s own admission, many vaccinated people have and will continue to get sick in the coming days.

Public health messaging and social norms surrounding COVID risk has shifted in recent weeks as the situation has become increasingly dire, taking on a tenor that the resembles what we saw in spring of 2020. Online (on both social and news media) doctors, government…