Victims of the unvaccinated

Ethical philosopher PETER SINGER looks at the issue of refusing the Covid jab, in the first of a series of essays

Novak Djokovic, the world’s top-ranking tennis player at the start of 2022, was looking forward to the Australian Open, held [that] January. He had won it in each of the past three years. One more victory would have given him a record 21 major titles, breaking a three-way tie with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. The Australian government, however, [then required] incoming visitors to show proof of vaccination, and Djokovic had previously refused to reveal his vaccination status, calling it “a private matter and an inappropriate inquiry”.

The family of Dale Weeks would disagree. Weeks, 78, was a patient being treated for sepsis at a small hospital in rural Iowa, but the treatment was not proving effective. The hospital sought to transfer him to a larger hospital where he could have surgery, but the surge in Covid-19 patients, almost all of them unvaccinated, meant there were no spare beds. It took 15 days for Weeks to obtain a transfer and by then it was too late.

Weeks was just one of the many victims of the unvaccinated. His daughter said, “The thing that bothers me the most is people’s selfish decision not to get vaccinated and the failure to see how this affects a greater group of people. That’s the part that’s really difficult to swallow.”

Around the time Weeks died, in December 2021, Rob Davidson, an emergency room physician in Michigan, wrote an essay for the New York Times that provided a vivid picture of life in a hospital that had consistently been at or near capacity for several weeks. The overwhelming majority of patients had Covid-19, and 98% of those needing acute critical care were unvaccinated.