It is not a personal health decision when the failure to protect oneself endangers the lives of everyone.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Caricature by DonkeyHotey / Flickr / Creative Commons.
Like many Americans, I have been pondering how we could best end the pandemic of Covid-19 in the U.S. and in Texas. Most Republican governors and some Democratic ones are relying on a belief in personal responsibility — leave the decision to each individual to get vaccinated, wear a mask in public, and physically distance. After all, this reasoning goes, these measures are personal health decisions, not ones to be made by someone else.
But they are not personal health decisions when the failure to protect oneself endangers the lives of everyone. We are in a public health emergency that requires government intervention to protect the health and welfare of all. The 1918-19 flu epidemic is comparable to the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, that flu epidemic took the lives of 675,000 people in the U.S., and resulted in 50 million deaths worldwide. Mutations of that influenza pandemic continue to cause the yearly flu for which many receive annual vaccinations.
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