Sympathy and Compassion Could be Waning

 For decades, the so-called "vaccine hesitant" have been at it.  Starting with Edward Jenner's cowpox vaccine against smallpox, it's been nearly steady since then.

One of the most egregious examples of misinformation, falsification and lies was Andrew Wakefield's fiction that the MMR vaccine caused autism in children.  Claims of "vaccine injuries" have been almost non-stop since then.  That was in 1998.  It took until 2011 for The Lancet to declare that the original study was fraudulent.

For almost the whole of the past 18 months, the anti-vaccine crowd has been pressing the charge against the prospective vaccines and, once available, the actual products.

For most of the past century, the anti-vaccine crowd have been able to hide behind the herd immunity created when a good majority of the rest of the population got their vaccinations.  Sporadic outbreaks still occurred here and there, most notably of measles.  Measles vaccinations have stagnated and anti-vaccine people have attacked with vigour.  In 2018, over 140,000 people died around the world from what is an easily preventable disease.  Most deaths were in children under 5 years of age.

It would not be to much to call this criminal.

Now we have COVID-19.  Anti-vaccine nitwits have recently claimed the current crop of vaccines contain poisons, microchips, will make you magnetic, affect your fertility, affect other organs in your body (usually at some unspecified time in the future), were developed by Bill Gates as a method of population control, will alter your DNA.....and that's only a small sample of the craziness they've been promoting.

As the 4th Wave sweeps across much of the world, particularly the USA and Canada, patience is wearing a bit thin with falsifications from the anti-vaccine crowd that are holding down vaccination rates and therefore enabling the development of more variants and even more deaths and economic disruption.

In an article recently posted in The Atlantic, conservative commentator David Frum makes a valid point: Vaccinated America Has Had Enough.  He claims that this could have been mostly over by now.  "Post Trump America has decided that vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty."  (Trump, of course, was vaccinated back in January 2021).

Another conservative commentator I listen to regularly essentially said similar things.  This was in a podcast called Covid Compassion Fatigue, which can be heard here.  There was one brief point in the podcast where I was yanked back into consciousness by the comment that there was a "growing frustration with the unvaccinated and the politicians who enable them" (around 18:00).  Around the 27 minute point he asks who we should feel compassion for (children, healthcare workers) and that he just feels moments of "incandescent rage about the people who are fucking it all up".  And the following few minutes after that are particularly telling; life for a second summer with kids you're trying to protect.  And back to school, with masks, no field trips.... and because of adults and kids are paying the price.  If you want to hear a rant from the conservative ranks, this would be it.

Basically, it seems to come to this:

And we are getting very tired of it.