I suppose there is a certain grim resignation in taking a “live and let die” attitude toward the vaccine skeptics. But I am not so hard of heart that I can look complacently on cases like the California couple who died of COVID a few weeks apart, orphaning their five children, one of them a newborn. People keep telling me that they are capable of making their own decisions about the risks to take. Well, they might have a right to make those decisions—more on that in a moment—but the capability is evidently lacking, and many of the victims of these bad decisions, such as those five kids, didn’t really have a choice about it.

Moreover, these people’s carelessness with their own lives is turning out to have significant costs for the rest of us. Leaving aside the fact that some of us still have children too young to be vaccinated and elderly relatives for whom the vaccine is not as effective. (The vaccine primes the immune system, but this is less effective when the immune system is already weakened.) These remaining risks are relatively small, though in a massive national wave of infections, small risks become larger. Yet there are more direct impacts. The unvaccinated are overwhelming hospitals, brutally exploiting overworked doctors and nurses, and causing the vaccinated to have their care denied or delayed.

The unvaccinateds’ plan seems to be to live their lives as they like—and blithely take the risk that they could be letting others die from delayed care.