After a COVID skeptic falls to the disease, people ask an awkward question: Should we care?
Personally, I feel fed up with anti-mask, anti-vaccine loudmouths. They are causing people to get severely ill and die from COVID-19.
"Natural selection" is my response. "Bye, selfish stupid Republicans! You won't be missed."
By Danny Westneat, Seattle Times columnist
A reader wrote in with a blunt and honest comment that I want to share, because it alludes to a shift that’s taking place in society as we struggle to deal with this latest surge of the pandemic.
“I realized this pandemic is changing me, and not for the better,” the reader wrote. “It’s making me a colder and more callous person.”
She went on to describe a growing phenomenon. Which is that when people die of COVID-19 now, and inevitably it turns out they were unvaccinated or even had views that were hostile to the public health effort, “what pops into my mind first thing is ‘oh well, too bad.’”
“It’s a horrible reaction for any fellow human to have. I feel awful about it. But it’s there.”
It sure is. It happened locally when a man, aged 67, died this month of COVID in north Puget Sound. I’ve decided not to name the man, even though his death was public record, because he isn’t a public figure and his family only held his memorial last weekend and doesn’t need the extra layers of grief.
But the reality is awkward and also increasingly commonplace. The man had spent months on social media mocking the “Covid hype and hysteria created by the so-called experts,” as he dubbed it in a Facebook post last March. In between posts claiming the last election was stolen, he boosted a slew of vaccine lies, such as that the antibodies created by the shots would eventually turn deadly themselves. He mocked masks, proposed jail for Dr. Anthony Fauci, suggested people who took the vaccines were sheep, and so on.
On July 20, he wrote: “Covid isn’t the primary pandemic anymore. Irrational fear is.”
Four days later, these posts stopped. He was in a medically induced coma, due to COVID, according to family members. Two weeks after that he was dead.
Many north Puget Sounders have expressed public condolences for his passing. But many others, put off by his record of spreading COVID doubts and conspiracies, have all but danced on his grave.
“In the words of Trump’s 3rd wife, Melania, ‘I don’t really care, do you?’ ” read one comment on a local social media post about his death.
“Honestly, I am not sad for his death,” said another.
“This aged very poorly,” said another, underneath a recent Facebook post of his, still up after his death, in which he labeled the coronavirus “mass hysteria.”
These deaths of COVID skeptics, followed by a flood of schadenfreude, are fast becoming a daily spectacle in America. Most of them happen quietly, like this one in north Puget Sound. But in the past few weeks three prominent conservative radio hosts, who decried vaccines or called the coronavirus a “scamdemic,” have themselves perished of the disease.
This is only going to accelerate. The COVID deaths occurring in hospitals now are almost exclusively among the unvaccinated, and they are rising rapidly. At least until that changes, the dishing out of just deserts is probably going to proliferate as well.
“Should we care what happens to people who are willfully unvaccinated against COVID-19?” pondered a recent newspaper interview with an ethicist.
Does that question really require the services of an ethicist? Of course we should care. And yet:
“He chose to ignore the science that he was perfectly capable of understanding,” another poster wrote about the north Puget Sound man. “So I don’t have empathy for this person. Empathy is like pie — there is only so much to go around.”
I appreciate the candor of the reader who said the pandemic is making her a “colder and more callous person.” Back at the start, we speculated that maybe the pandemic would open eyes and hearts to the deep stratifications of society. Maybe it even has in some cases. But here 18 months on, it’s also clear that the polarized and politicized way the whole thing has played out is leading to a hardening of the tribes.
I think my reader is on to something. Her email was headlined: “Is empathy running out?”
“I go back and forth between being furious and sad,” she wrote. “Furious at the anti-science ignorance causing the thousands of totally unnecessary deaths. Sad at my own growing heartlessness about it.”
Maybe that’s compassion fatigue after a long two years, and it will pass (it would help if everyone would just get the damn vaccine already). But I’m sad-mad too — incredulous actually — at how something as natural as an infectious microbe could be cynically manipulated into a political force this divisive.
It’s sobering how effectively this virus preyed on the weak spots in our culture, every bit as much as it has managed to penetrate and infect so many bodies.
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10 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Last winter the flu cases were down dramatically because of distancing, masks and the start of the vaccine. If the people of this country had taken these facts seriously and continued distancing, masks and the vaccine we would not be in the mess we are now. Sympathy? NO. Thinning the repuklican herd.
starwatcher-al
Level 7
Sep 2, 2021
1
It's so easy to take an apathetic viewpoint...it really is. Its so simple to say to yourself...they were stupid, ignorant, morons who were eliminated by their own actions...very Darwinian we can say. But what if it is your own child ... What if it is ANY child? What if it is someone who you know to be a decent person but was turned "to the dark side" by one of their children (who happens to be a misguided nurse)? What say you then? What happens to your instant judgement when it is someone you love? What happens to our humanity and our compassion? What happens to all the love we feel that we want to share? Do we turn our backs? Speaking as someone who lost one son from a trajedy 12 years ago and now his brother not getting vaccinated and becoming deathly sick ... I can't simply say anymore that I don't care about all these people dying...i hate that they are being slaughtered in the name of political expedience. I HATE that anyone has to die needlessly. I HATE what this country and world has become. We are the purveyors of death and the harbingers of an apocalyptic mindset that is hell bent on destroying all life. We have lost sight of our human goals...to save one another from suffering and lift each other from the bonds of slavery and oppression we were founded on. We are still slaves of a master who can simply be defeated with a simple ballot but until we bond as one and throw off the chains that bind us we will continue to do their bidding. I for one refuse to continue the hatred...it makes no sense to destroy ourselves when we have it in our grasp to help one another. Sometimes it takes more than may seem reasonable as an effort but wouldn't that effort be worth it if it were your own child...or any child...or someone you know to be a good person...even if misguided?...the point is we have to find a way...we can't be judge, jury and executioner...its so easy to point a finger...thats what the other side is doing...we know they are wrong and we also know that two wrongs don't make a right. We need to BE the change...I lost one child...I am NOT losing ANOTHER...I am NOT losing a step-daughter because of misinformation...I am NOT LOSING A GOOD NEIGHBOR because if misinformation. I am a good person who wants to help spread the good...not reamplify the bad. I have chosen the ones I want to help LIVE...i can't help everyone but I can help some...we all need to choose who we CAN help and get out and do it...and that goes for getting people registered to VOTE...if we are so much smarter c.... than we need to use it and help effect a change. Otherwise we are just tooting our own horn...in the meantime people die needlessly. Namaste
phoenixone1
Level 8
Sep 2, 2021
0
You have to remember that however good it is, to always find some empathy for those who suffer and die. And it is of course. Yet in the end, every loud and proud anti-vaxer is doing their best to, and is probably successful in, persuading or forcing many others to imitate them. That at least makes them in effect, guilty of manslaughter, probably, in most cases, multiple counts, and if they are not truly convinced anti-vaxers themselves, but are faking it for power or profit, then that becomes effective murder. It would never "stick" as they say, in a court of law, and they are therefore only moral not a legal crimes, but it does, make what sometimes happens, natural justice, so that there is no need to fell any guilt if we do not in fact feel sympathy.
Fernapple
Level 9
Sep 1, 2021
3
for all the false pride spoken in defiance of the vaccine, and all the fear the antivax crowd likes to revel in they don't seem to realize that the freedoms they claim to cherish are being denied by none other than themselves. they are also free to be vaccinated, but they miss that. cheating themselves out of some healthier years, or even life altogether. i myself can only tolerate so much stupid. that threshold has been reached. there's no excuse for that kind of dumb.
hankster
Level 9
Sep 1, 2021
3
These past 20 or more years the ideological differences between them and us have grown. We are both so convinced that our way is right, it is the only way to be, we can no longer regard the other side dispassionately and listen for the truth of their belief. Understand that the us and the them are shifting groups of individuals who either agree with us our disagree. There is no rational discourse, it is all heated rhetoric. IF you change your mind/learn more/evolve your base groups scorns you and you may lose your identity before you are ready to. People really get dug in to being afraid of change, of education, of evolving. It is quite irrational. And that is why there are people dying of covid who have refused to be vaccinated. Our last less than illustrious president didn't do a damn thing towards reconciliation or breaking down barriers. He was all for more rigid barriers, and this is the price the nation is paying for that horrible decision. I am/was a true bleeding heart compassionate liberal. But my well of compassion has dried up and my give a damn got up and went. My mind screams let the suckers die, they brought it on themselves. My mouth and fingers try to make it less scathing than that, but really... Karma is a bitch and she is working overtime. Yes, I have a dearth of compassion, and I worry for me and for the rest of the world. This isn't going in the right direction, but I'm too tired to do more than notice it is going to hell.
HippieChick58
Level 9
Sep 1, 2021
3
I'm allowed to feel however I please about whomever I choose.
For those who, quite stupidly, refused the vaccine, refused to wear a mask, and consequently contracted the virus, and died, I have ZERO sympathy.
They ignorantly and deliberately put themselves and others at risk.
I cannot be reasonably expected to have any sympathy or empathy for those people.
Truthfully, I don't care one bit what anyone else thinks about me because of it.
KKGator
Level 9
Sep 1, 2021
3
It's evolving beyond simple compassion fatigue now. Lots of ethical discussions are going on about whether to even admit the unvaxxed into hospitals. The fact is, the unvaxxed typically need far more time in the hospital, far more care, often an ICU bed for an extended period, and still end-up dead. The break-through cases of the vaccinated, on the other hand, can be in and out in a fraction of the time, rarely get near the ICU and almost never see the morgue and the refrigerated body trucks. The unvaxxed are taking valuable overwhelmed hospital space needed by accident victims, cancer patients, childbirths and others, who were more careful about Covid and their fellow humans. Dr Spock would simply state, "It's an easy logic question". I'm 100% fine with overburdened hospitals requiring proof of vaccination before admitting Covid cases. They should post big signs: "No Vax Proof, No Service".
mtnhome
Level 7
Sep 1, 2021
4
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