Politicians want to turn back the clock on science as lifesaver
Five thousand years after the Egyptians demonstrated science’s ability to hold death at bay, Florida’s governor is committed to denying his constituents that benefit.
The Egyptians invented a device that archeologists call a Nilometer. Basically a column erected in the upper reaches of the Nile River, it measured the depth of water that would flow downstream to irrigate a narrow ribbon of arable land.
Too little or too much predicted a crop failure, famine and starvation — unless grain from a previous harvest was stored. That experience is echoed in the biblical story of Joseph explaining Pharaoh’s dream as a warning that lean times follow bountiful seasons.
Currently Floridians are contracting COVID-19 in numbers that threaten to overwhelm the state’s hospitals. Its positivity rate for those tested for the disease was 20.7% as of Aug. 17; in Illinois it was 5.9%.
Yet Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office has threatened to deny salaries to school district administrators who violate his prohibition on requiring students to wear masks. A federal court enjoined his ban on cruise ship operators requiring proof of vaccination from passengers. DeSantis vowed to appeal the decision.
Why would he do that? During the renewed COVID-19 outbreak, those who die of the virus are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. Those who escape it are overwhelmingly vaccinated.
Indeed, beginning with the Nilometer, history records science’s slow-but-steady victories over nature’s malevolent side. Each milestone is effectively marked: “People don’t have to die of what their forebears did.”
In the Middle Ages, the Black Death, an infectious disease, killed upward of a third of Europe’s population. But in 1796, Edward Jenner developed an experimental smallpox vaccine, and within two centuries, smallpox was wiped out. In 1861, Louis Pasteur proved that germs cause disease — a discovery that stripped dysentery and typhoid fever of the power that had killed millions.
Beginning with penicillin in the 1940s, antibiotics saved myriad lives. In 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk announced over the radio that a vaccine could prevent polio, and parents vied to get their children to the head of the inoculation line. Americans then had a great respect for science.
Obviously something has changed when DeSantis thinks there is political capital to be made by interposing himself between science and the voters.
He says he wants parents to have the choice of sending their children to school masked or unmasked. Yet what right does he have to make that the law? He is a Republican, a party committed to the principle that decisions should be made as close as possible to those effected by them.
That philosophy implies that local school boards should set the masking rules. A number of Florida’s school boards are suing DeSantis for preventing them from doing so.
The governor’s no-jab cruiseship edict sounds a discordant note against the conservative mantra that government should tread lightly.
An ocean-going ship carries residents of various states. It leaves Florida the instant it pulls away from the dock. By what logic should its governor’s ideas about what people can, or cannot do, to protect their health accompany them on the high seas? Let an all-vaccinated voyage be a passenger’s choice. Those who don’t want one can step onto a different boarding ramp.
DeSantis is not alone in his thinking.
“Texans, not government, should decide their best health practices,” Gov. Greg Abbott explained, when banning mask mandates in that state. Abbott himself tested positive for COVID19, his office said Tuesday.
Freedom to choose has a certain intuitive appeal. But in practice, it’s often limited. Try telling a traffic cop you don’t think the government can make you buy auto insurance when he asks to see your license and insurance card.
I was once cited for not mowing my lawn. Raised in big-city apartments, I didn’t know that the village where I was living had such an ordinance.
The principle is that my autonomy ends where it might harm another person. If I don’t have insurance and bang into another car, the owner could be stuck with the repair bill. If I let my grass go to seed, the wind could carry my choice of Kentucky Blue Grass into my neighbor’s yard.
Similarly those who won’t wear a mask or get vaccinated imperil others. They are walking Petri dishes for ever more dangerous COVID-19 variants, thus prolonging the epidemic ad infinitum.
But how can that point be made in an age when the governors of Florida and Texas reinforce the public’s skepticism of science?
In despair, I fear that our only hope lies in a modern day Joseph. I pray for someone with a strong prophetic voice to explain to those who dream of an America where no one has to sacrifice a smidgen for the common good that the result would be a national nightmare.