If only people had more common sense than dogs

Let’s say there’s an outbreak of deadly parvovirus in your neighborhood. Your beloved golden retriever Red, however, goes into a full-scale panic attack at the sight or smell of a veterinarian. You know the disease is highly communicable and potentially fatal.

There’s a reliable vaccine, but the dog won’t listen. Runs and hides under the porch. Fights the leash like a smallmouth bass on a hook. Rolls over on his back and has to be dragged, panting and drooling. Maybe even bites the hand that feeds him.

God forbid you should force the issue. No vaccine shot for Red. Even a dog has his rights, after all — among them the right to die in agony while shedding the deadly virus all over the neighborhood.

Put that way, the whole national “debate” over the COVID-19 vaccine seems kind of crazy, doesn’t it? When the vaccine refuser is a golden retriever, we take action because we understand that the dog can’t be reasoned with.

(When I lived in the country, I learned to administer my own vaccinations. I also prevented the animals from watching Fox News. It only riles up the cows.)

That said, I agree with the Republican governor of Alabama. Asked what it would take to convince her constituents to get vaccinated — Alabama is among the least-protected in the nation — Gov. Kay Ivey responded, “I don’t know. You tell me. Folks [are] supposed to have common sense. But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”

Trouble is, folks tend not to have a lot of common sense when they’re frightened. Not much more than their ancestors in 14th-century Europe who blamed the Black Death on Jews poisoning wells. Also on beggars and foreigners generally. Many lepers were put to death.

Mainly, though, it was the Jews.

Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t Jewish, but he’ll do for a certain kind of fool. I think we all know the kind I mean.

Alabama physician Brytney Cobia wrote a Facebook post about admitting young, previously healthy patients to a COVID-19 ward in Birmingham.

“One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine,” Dr. Cobia wrote, as quoted on AL.com. “I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”

After they die, Cobia continued, “I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same.

“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu.’ But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t.”

She prays that people will learn.

Many white southerners, Politico reports, “are turning down COVID-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best.”

Especially, of course, when they do.

Possibly they’ll listen to Gov. Ivey or Dr. Cobia, but not soon enough, I fear. Besides, as in the 14th century, paranoia is worldwide. There was a recent anti-vaccine rally in London’s Trafalgar Square, with a host of crackpots invoking imaginary, often self-contradictory horrors.

Vaccines are a satanic plot for world domination; or they’re a surveillance technology, turning your body into a 5G transmitter; or they alter your DNA; or they cause infertility. Or vaccines will just flat kill you.

Closer to home, the epicenter of the deadly pandemic surge in Arkansas, where I live, appears to be Branson, Missouri, the cornball country music capital of middle America.

“Branson has a lot of country-western shows,” Dr. Marc Johnson, an epidemiologist at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, told the Daily Beast. “No vaccines. No masks. A bunch of people indoors and air conditioning, tightly packed, listening to music, possibly singing along, i.e. a superspreading event.”

Yee-haw! The town’s mayor has proclaimed, “I DO NOT believe it’s my place, or the place of any politician, to endorse, promote or compel any person to get any vaccine.” He’s all about freedom and liberty, the mayor.

Only what about my freedom not to get infected because some country karaoke fan thinks COVID-19 is a hoax? Government and private employers can’t force people to take the shot, but they can require vaccines as a condition of employment. You already can’t get into Yankee Stadium without proof of vaccination. NFL teams will likely require it, too.

If people had any sense, you wouldn’t have to drag them from under the porch. But history teaches that you must.

Gene Lyons is a columnist with the Arkansas Times.

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