New variant emphasizes importance of vaccine

To paraphrase a well-known saying about personal liberties, “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.” This is never truer than following recent reports of the new omicron variant of coronavirus. I expect it to continue to spread around the globe as fast as airplanes link one continent to another.

What is to be done to stop a variant that could make delta resemble the sniffles? President Joe Biden must push to allow immediate nationwide vaccine mandates. Many state leaders will defy that kind of law for political and not scientific reasons. Still, the federal government is inculcated enough in our daily lives for anti-vaccine supporters to become exiles within their own communities should they fail to produce a legitimate vaccine card when required. Individuals caught with counterfeit vaccine cards should be arrested and charged with a felony, for they are implicitly committing manslaughter.

We cannot permit anti-vaccine members of the media to sabotage our efforts to defeat COVID-19. With more than 803,000 deaths in the United States, we remain at war with an unseen enemy. At the present mortality rate, it is killing more citizens every four days than all those who died during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

As omicron is named after the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet, I fear there will be no one left to christen omega.

I am not a “Chicken Little” or a big chicken. I’m a veteran and teacher who has lived up most of his life, yet I will do whatever I can for babies taking their first breath right now in the same hospitals as unvaccinated patients who are dying of COVID-19. I want those babies to have the same inalienable right to breathe the freedom of growing up in this great land as I did.

We owe it to the future to protect the present so that it does not inherit a moribund past.

— Stewart Lindh, Sausalito