NYTimes | When asked if he had gotten a Covid-19 vaccine, Lamar Jackson, a quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, declined to answer. “I feel it’s a personal decision,” he said. “I’m just going to keep my feelings to my family and myself.”
Jackson echoed another N.F.L. quarterback, Cam Newton of the New England Patriots, who said much the same a few days earlier. “It’s too personal to discuss,” Newton replied, when asked if he was vaccinated. “I’ll just keep it at that.”
Jackson and Newton are not the only prominent people to say hey, it’s personal when asked about the vaccine. It is a common dodge for public-facing vaccine skeptics or those using vaccine skepticism for their own ends. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly (albeit less abrasively) in May that vaccination was a “personal and private decision” and that “no one should be shamed, coerced or mandated to take Covid-19 vaccines that are being allowed under an emergency use authorization.”
Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike
riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal
decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned.
Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often
debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has
consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal
decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve
herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we
refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve
through collective action.
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