David Frum Jumps The Shark

... If so, if the vaccines work as well as they seem to work, then vaccine refusal really does become a personal decision, like a motorcyclist refusing to wear a helmet.

I believe we ought to try to save people from self-harm. But there are practical limits to paternalism 6/x

— David Frum (@davidfrum) April 21, 2021

In the earlier phases of COVID, we were all in it together. One person's reckless behavior endangered his or her more prudent neighbor. As highly effective vaccines spread, however, the harm of COVID denial increasingly falls almost wholly on the denier. 11/x

— David Frum (@davidfrum) April 21, 2021

It's true we can't compel people to take vaccines. I understand the campaign to eliminate polio as we did smallpox ran aground in Pakistan where the vaccine campaign was connected to the CIA, and anti-vax conspiracy theories joined with reality.  Vaccination rates plummeted, in no small part because you simply can’t compel people to get vaccinated.

“Like a motorcyclist refusing to wear a helmet.”  But here’s the problem with that analogy:  we still pick the unhelmeted motorcyclist out of the ditch after the accident and take them to the ER for emergency surgery.  Because we don’t leave people in the gutter to die because we think they “deserve” it.  The problem with refusing to wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle is not only the risk to the rider, it’s the burden it places on society.  But we have accepted that burden, because we gave up on forcing people to wear helmets.  We still require car passengers wear seatbelts, but that contradiction is another topic for another day.

We still provide medical care to the motorcycle rider, helmeted or not.  We will still provide medical care to Covid patients, vaccinated or not.  As I understand it, that’s the problem with the pandemic in the first place:  not the death toll, which is indeed terrible; but the strain on the healthcare system.  Has the success of the vaccine so quickly wiped from memory the crowded hospitals, the overflowing beds, the stories of burn-out among healthcare workers (doctors, nurses, LVN’s, etc., etc., etc.).  The problem of the pandemic is not limited to infection rates and who can still be infected.

Eventually a free society reaches the limits of its ability to protect the ignorant and careless from themselves - and what a society cannot do, it can have no duty to do. END

— David Frum (@davidfrum) April 21, 2021

A society, free or not, cannot compel vaccinations (is Pakistan a "free society"?). I suppose we could look to China and its treatment of the Uyghurs as an example of how an un-free society treats a minority (and those who refuse the vaccination in America are definitely a numerical minority).  What a society cannot do, it can have no duty to do, though, is an empty and stupid statement.  No society can prevent all murders; that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a duty to try, and to try to punish murderers (no society can punish all its murders, either).  No society can cure all disease, but it has a duty to try. It cannot save everyone who suffers from Covid; but it has a duty to try.  We don’t “win” over the foolish who refuse vaccination.  We lose, because of their foolishness.  They lose, too; but we cannot balance that by trying to hold them solely responsible for their decisions.  “No man is an island,” and it is not just each man’s death that diminishes me.