Dear unvaccinated Americans: America's top health care groups are tired of your bullshit. They're tired of you coming into emergency rooms because you refused to protect yourself against a deadly pandemic. They're tired of working nonstop as waves of unvaccinated Americans who didn't think they had anything to worry about flood emergency rooms and are stuffed into whatever makeshift critical care units can be cobbled together. They're tired of burning out from trying to keep you alive—when you weren't willing to lift a finger to do so yourselves.
That's the between-the-lines reading of a joint statement by the American Medical Association and dozens of other top health associations released in support of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's rule that companies with over 100 workers require their workers to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly testing so as to not expose others to the virus.
The new OSHA rules are "reasonable" and "essential," say the 60-plus health care groups, and businesses should adopt them voluntarily.
This is straightforward stuff; when in the middle of a deadly pandemic with an American death toll that is speedily chugging toward seven digits, the only options are limited. The first choice is to quarantine the whole country until the virus dies out, but now that it's crossed to animals like deer, that option is now closed to us—good work, multiple random people who apparently wiped their nose on our wildlife. We could also impose universal masking for the indefinite future, thus making the burden on our hospitals more manageable as we get to herd immunity the Very Hard Way. Or we could avail ourselves of the now-available, now-proven-to-work vaccine that makes you near-immune to the pandemic even if you go out to participate in lamppost-licking contests or wedge yourselves into stadiums to scream into each other's mouths.
There is an obvious right choice there, and only conspiracy theorists and Republicans are balking at it. We can vaccinate ourselves out of a pandemic. This hasn't happened since the days of smallpox and polio. But we only get one shot at it, because once the virus mutates into strains different enough that our vaccines can't catch them all, then the disease now causing life-changing, lifelong organ damage even among people that survive it may become yet another legacy we have passed on to our children and grandchildren.
So listen, assholes, get the damn vaccine already. The rest of us are tired of hearing your griping, we are not going to take kindly to COVID-19 becoming a permanent top killer of Americans, and at this point, even the medical professionals whose careers are devoted to keeping you safe are nigh-on demanding America's businesses round up their employees and dart them rather than letting the crisis at hospitals continue.
I am putting that uncharitably, of course. The professional way to say it is: "This requirement by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is reasonable and essential to protecting workers."
In the end, however, the unvaccinated among us are putting too large a burden on everyone else around them. As we have seen in countless chronicles of the belligerently unvaccinated, dying is not the only possible outcome of an infection. The unvaccinated are straining hospital systems. They are leaving behind orphans and widows. They are infecting others, including those who cannot get the vaccine themselves or who have medical conditions that render the vaccine ineffective. They are killing people who need hospital beds but cannot get them because those who "voluntarily" remained unvaccinated are now "voluntarily" clogging emergency rooms with their resulting symptoms. They are causing medical professionals to quit in droves after no longer being able to withstand warlike conditions in their offices.
Opportunistic Republicans, nearly every one of them also sedition-backers and hoax-promoters, are seizing on anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and using them for self-promotion. If that had not happened—and the reason for it was near-exclusively the attempt to protect the incompetent buffoon Trump from criticism for his utter inability to even grasp what the pandemic was, much less how to respond to it—then we would not be having these conversations. But we are.
The medical professionals, the pandemic experts—literally everyone with any skin in the game who is not trying to become a half-assed "influencer" to their own collection of the damned—are all quite certain that vaccinations are the best way to end the pandemic without further mass casualties. We need not listen to the blowhards any longer. The mandates are "reasonable and essential," and Americans who want to work in jobs that require human interaction during a pandemic, can be big boys and girls and get their arms poked like the rest of us.
That's the between-the-lines reading of a joint statement by the American Medical Association and dozens of other top health associations released in support of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's rule that companies with over 100 workers require their workers to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly testing so as to not expose others to the virus.
The new OSHA rules are "reasonable" and "essential," say the 60-plus health care groups, and businesses should adopt them voluntarily.
This is straightforward stuff; when in the middle of a deadly pandemic with an American death toll that is speedily chugging toward seven digits, the only options are limited. The first choice is to quarantine the whole country until the virus dies out, but now that it's crossed to animals like deer, that option is now closed to us—good work, multiple random people who apparently wiped their nose on our wildlife. We could also impose universal masking for the indefinite future, thus making the burden on our hospitals more manageable as we get to herd immunity the Very Hard Way. Or we could avail ourselves of the now-available, now-proven-to-work vaccine that makes you near-immune to the pandemic even if you go out to participate in lamppost-licking contests or wedge yourselves into stadiums to scream into each other's mouths.
There is an obvious right choice there, and only conspiracy theorists and Republicans are balking at it. We can vaccinate ourselves out of a pandemic. This hasn't happened since the days of smallpox and polio. But we only get one shot at it, because once the virus mutates into strains different enough that our vaccines can't catch them all, then the disease now causing life-changing, lifelong organ damage even among people that survive it may become yet another legacy we have passed on to our children and grandchildren.
So listen, assholes, get the damn vaccine already. The rest of us are tired of hearing your griping, we are not going to take kindly to COVID-19 becoming a permanent top killer of Americans, and at this point, even the medical professionals whose careers are devoted to keeping you safe are nigh-on demanding America's businesses round up their employees and dart them rather than letting the crisis at hospitals continue.
I am putting that uncharitably, of course. The professional way to say it is: "This requirement by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is reasonable and essential to protecting workers."
In the end, however, the unvaccinated among us are putting too large a burden on everyone else around them. As we have seen in countless chronicles of the belligerently unvaccinated, dying is not the only possible outcome of an infection. The unvaccinated are straining hospital systems. They are leaving behind orphans and widows. They are infecting others, including those who cannot get the vaccine themselves or who have medical conditions that render the vaccine ineffective. They are killing people who need hospital beds but cannot get them because those who "voluntarily" remained unvaccinated are now "voluntarily" clogging emergency rooms with their resulting symptoms. They are causing medical professionals to quit in droves after no longer being able to withstand warlike conditions in their offices.
Opportunistic Republicans, nearly every one of them also sedition-backers and hoax-promoters, are seizing on anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and using them for self-promotion. If that had not happened—and the reason for it was near-exclusively the attempt to protect the incompetent buffoon Trump from criticism for his utter inability to even grasp what the pandemic was, much less how to respond to it—then we would not be having these conversations. But we are.
The medical professionals, the pandemic experts—literally everyone with any skin in the game who is not trying to become a half-assed "influencer" to their own collection of the damned—are all quite certain that vaccinations are the best way to end the pandemic without further mass casualties. We need not listen to the blowhards any longer. The mandates are "reasonable and essential," and Americans who want to work in jobs that require human interaction during a pandemic, can be big boys and girls and get their arms poked like the rest of us.