Vaccine Refusal Will Come at a Cost--For All of Us
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The Atlantic
@TheAtlantic
People who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine will put themselves and the people around them at greater risk of sickness and death. They'll also cost the rest of us a bunch of money, @IsaacDovere reports:
Vaccine Refusal Will Come at a Cost—For All of Us
People who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine will have higher health-care costs. The rest of us will foot the bill.
theatlantic.com
3:10 PM · Apr 10, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/vaccine-refusal-hesitancy-economic-costs/618528/
Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics, or pushing back on government control, or a post he saw on Facebook. He doesn’t really remember. His lungs do, though: By the end of the day, he’s on a ventilator.
You’ll pay for that man’s decisions. So will I. We all will—in insurance premiums, if he has a plan with your provider, or in tax dollars, if the emergency room he goes to is in a public hospital. The vaccine refusers could cost us billions. Maybe more, over the next few decades, with all the complications they could develop. And we can’t do anything about it except hope that more people get their shots than those who say they will right now.
If the 30 percent of Americans who are telling pollsters they won’t get vaccinated follow through, the costs of their decisions will pile up. The economy could take longer to get back to full speed, and once it does, it could get shut down again by outbreaks. Variants will continue to spread, and more people will die. Each COVID-19 case requires weeks of costly rehabilitation. Even after the pandemic fades, millions of vaccine refusers could turn into hundreds of thousands of patients who need extra care, should they come down with the disease. Their bet that they’ve outsmarted the coronavirus or their insistence that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates were trying to trick them will not stop them from going to the doctor when they’re having trouble breathing, dealing with extreme fatigue, or struggling with other lasting effects of COVID-19. (A new study found that 34 percent of COVID-19 survivors are diagnosed with a neurological or psychological condition within six months of recovering from the initial illness.)
The economic costs of vaccine refusal aren’t yet a major part of the political conversation. That’s likely to change as we move past the first year of the pandemic. “You have a liberty right, and that unfortunately is imposing on everyone else and their liberty right not to have to pay for your stubbornness. And that’s what’s maddening,” Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, told me. Inslee is 70, and fully vaccinated. The three-term Democrat was in a good mood because he was on his way to see his baby granddaughter, whom he hadn’t hugged in a year. But after what he’s gone through since early 2020—the first American COVID-19 outbreak and the first explosion of COVID-denialist demonstrations were both in Washington—he’s angry and sad that so many people are refusing to get their shots.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Hey, how are you doing? I heard you had some kind of health thing, good to see you here!
I'm sure this country could find many vaccine administrators from gun enthusiasts.
Yes, I'm joking!
They work. They've been tested. Millions of folks have been injected.
The FDA has given emergency approvals, but they are approvals none the less.
That is one of the differences between an emergency auth and a normal one.
Military personnel cannot be ordered to take it because it is an emergency auth.
If it was a normal one, then orders could possibly be issued, though it would be an extreme situation for that to occur imo.
But, I would withhold any IRS federal tax refunds until one could provide proof of vaccination.
From what I understand, when you get vaccinated your information is updated on the State’s database. Crosscheck your federal return with the State where you indicated you were vaccinated. No information, no refund. Then impose a six month period to get the shot once available and then forfeiture of the refund it you haven’t received it.
But no tax ...
When they figure out that the un-vaxxed rubes are costing them, this is all going to change.
Suddenly it's going to be PATRIOTIC to get vaccinated asap.
