We The Friggin' People

Conservatives realize that communicable diseases are not like obesity or car accidents challenge https://t.co/tJy27GByET

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 23, 2021

I suppose when the obese are crowding hospitals and ICU's and taking up all the ventilators and staff needed to treat ventilated patients, as well as overworking the nursing staff and still coming in in droves and hordes, we could say this was an apt comparison.

Which is not to say refusing treatment of patients is not a course without any moral or ethical land mines in it.  The argument for refusing treatment is not even a distant cousin of the reasoning that led to the infamous Tuskegee experiments; it is in fact the same argument.

We don't decide that some people are expendable or unworthy of medical care; for any reason.  Great as the frustration at this situation may be, this is not the exception that proves the rule that we almost always treat those in medical need without regard to social, political, racial, ethnic, or criminal, status.  This doesn't even raise the question of triage.  It is based on the assumption that the unvaccinated are willfully refusing medical care until their life is threatened. And that blanket assumption is no more appropriate than the blanket assumption that doctors always know best how to treat a presenting patient with a documented medical history.*

*Don't get me started.  It's a personal and anecdotal point, but I don't think medical care is always perfect and doctors are wise determiners of what is best for each individual case.  Still, they are the best we have, and the minute we allow them to decide you are worthy of medical care because of your vaccination status, but your friend is not, is the minute in which we stop even pretending to follow the high ideals we say our country represents.

On the other hand, at this point I'm willing to tell the people who identify themselves so publicly as insane and interested only in their own navel gazing, to drop dead and we'll pick up the bodies later.

.@JordanKlepper deserves a Pulitzer. pic.twitter.com/CB63GZmHBT

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 24, 2021

We the people at least have an interest in limiting the spread of cholera from dead bodies.