Containing COVID, again
Monday, New York City, which has lost 34,000 lives to COVID-19, enters a new phase in its attempt to fend off a mutating virus that now mercifully kills only around 10 of us per day. To encourage the more than 20% of holdout adults citywide to get their shots and keep common spaces safer for the vaccinated majority and ineligible-to-be-vaccinated children, the city will wisely begin enforcing its indoor vaccine mandate for restaurants, gyms and performances.
There will be caterwauling aplenty from businesses that don’t want to comply and from stubborn individuals who assert their right to go wherever they’d like, unmasked and unvaccinated, despite scientific proof that face coverings and vaccines frustrate the pathogen’s spread and render it relatively harmless, respectively.
No one wants the prolonged agony of a pandemic dragging on for a third year — except, it seems, the holdouts.
Jimmy Kimmel, who quipped that an unvaccinated person who swallowed ivermectin (the anti-parasitic medication being taken off-label to treat COVID) shouldn’t get an ICU bed that could go to a vaccinated person with a heart attack, is callously wrong. Doctors have an obligation to treat, and our nation has a responsibility to help, alcoholics with liver disease, two-pack-a-day smokers with lung cancer and unvaccinated Americans with COVID. Liberals especially are supposed to believe in universal health care access. But one can sympathize with Kimmel’s frustration, and with the frustration of those eager to go back to work but worried about bringing COVID home.
The COVID-19 get-vaccinated-or-get-tested-weekly mandate for large employers issued by President Biden’s Labor Department rests on the authority of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration — which, according to its 1970 law, is designed to ensure for all “a place of employment...free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees.”
For most of us, the most serious workplace hazard of the moment isn’t an un-ergonomic keyboard or a shortage of hardhats. It’s fellow workers spreading a deadly pathogen.