Anti-vaxxers aren't the only ones who need persuading

Dr. Boedy is a healthy adult. He has been vaccinated, so his risk of getting an infection on any given day is about one in 5,000, and his risk of getting a bad enough case of COVID to require hospitalization is closer to one in 1 million. He is, on top of that, insisting on wearing a mask — a totally unnecessary precaution for a vaccinated person to address risks that low, but one that would reduce that already-minuscule risk to an even lower figure. Yet he feels that it is an “emotional hellscape” to return to the classroom.

This is risk aversion taken to an unhealthy extreme. All across the country, people who have been vaccinated face a risk of serious illness from COVID that is far less than dozens of other risks they used to face in daily life — and yet, they insist on masking, social distancing, foregoing activities they used to engage in, and in some cases continuing precautions like obsessive hand sanitizing and the maintenance of plastic barriers that we know now are simply theater. And they remain obsessed with telling other people what to do. What will it take to convince these people to return to normal living? It is clear now that it will take a very long time for COVID infections to go away everywhere, especially given the difficulty of getting the entire global population vaccinated, even vast third world countries and no-go zones like Afghanistan. (Even in the United States, fewer than half of the population get a flu vaccine every year.) Certainly, alarmist reporting on “breakthrough” cases is not helping, and our public-health authorities appear incapable of talking these people down because a lot of the public-health authorities themselves think this way. There seems to be an idea that vaccinated people cannot return to normal life until they have seen everyone else forced to be vaccinated — but would even that do it? The insistence in some quarters on reimposing mask mandates without regard to vaccination status would suggest that even compulsory vaccination will not be enough.