What is your red line?

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

During the current struggle between vaccinated and unvaccinated, I have been thinking about what it means to support the exclusion of certain groups from society. For example, Emmanuel Macron recently proposed that “they” should perhaps not be regarded as citizens. It is one thing to suggest enforced vaccinations in a heated online conversation or a Tweet, but once you dig a little deeper, certain noteworthy consequences appear. Below, I will simply list some proposals – simple solutions – that I have experienced in my own social network, and how I interpret their consequences. It will not be a pleasant read.

Let’s start with enforced vaccinations, i.e., strapping the patient to a chair and bringing out the needle. What does it mean, in practice? Personally, I cannot see how it can harmonize with the Nuremberg code or the Hippocratic oath. An argument in favor of the enforced medical procedure is that it will ease the burden on the health care system. If enforced vaccinations are put into effect, that implies that some proportion of healthcare workers will likely refuse to execute the procedure. Consequently, we will need to punish and/or fire them from their job. Which will increase the burden that we were supposed to ease. Whether this effect is a total societal benefit or not, I am not qualified to evaluate in detail, but given what happened when some people increased their toilet paper consumption somewhat back in 2020, it does not look promising to me (excluding humanitarian aspects).

If we now consider the person who refuse the treatment, they will likely face a monetary fine, as in Austria, Italy, or Greece. Some people might refuse it anyway, and sooner or later they will become bankrupt and homeless. In this scenario, let’s say that the state will now be “humane” and not strap them to a chair and inject them with force. But some punishment is perhaps still necessary, and they might need to be imprisoned when they cannot afford to pay their fines anymore. However, these unvaccinated people should now be considered contagious and cannot be placed in regular prisons out of concern for the other inmates. Which means we will need to build special camps where we can intern “them”. It’s doesn’t really roll off the tongue nicely, does it?

The next scenario that I have seen is that people propose that unvaccinated humans should be denied health care, because “they brought it onto themselves by their own choice”. To be fair, if the exclusion from the public health care system is compensated by an appropriate tax reduction, some people might consider this a good deal. But there remains a pedagogical challenge to explain how a vaccinated obese 65-year-old man who smokes a package of cigarettes a day is a lesser threat to the health care system than an unvaccinated 20-year-old female athlete. This might be a hard sell to some people, and the one-size-fits-all solution could potentially reduce trust in society. Another issue with the denial of health care to certain groups of the population is that it will necessitate some kind of socially motivated triage in the emergency department. When a critically injured human arrives at the hospital, it is probably best to start treatment immediately, no questions asked, instead of starting an administrative routine to figure out whether the patient is worthy of treatment or not. It might be fair to say that this will increase the burden on the health care workers. Let’s say that the two people in the example above arrive at the hospital with the ambulance with critical Covid breathing problems about to turn blue. The female athlete should then be denied treatment according to the doctrine. But what if she also has a broken leg, would it be fair to treat her broken leg? One could argue that leg treatment is permitted but only if her symptoms are mild. If she needs a ventilator then it’s game over. Or you could just go with the one-size-fits-all solution (usually not a good idea in medicine) and deny her all kinds of treatment. To define an adequate treatment threshold is somewhat challenging. And demonic.

This is the darkest blog post I have written, and I am sorry for that. I prefer to focus on the positive in my writings. But I just had to get this out of my system before it corrupts me. I am deeply troubled by how easily these kinds of comments have become mainstream, referring to “them” as basically the scum of the Earth. The scenarios described above are appalling. And they are used casually today, by people in my own social network. However, a person proposing these measures could also be acting in emotional distress, perhaps after losing their livelihood or being denied their beloved passion because of restrictions. Fear and Desperation cloud judgment. In contrast to Greta, I don’t want you to panic. It seems unlikely to me that they have thought this through and concluded that it is a desired outcome. You just need to run the train of thought a little further and see what happens at the next station. The boiling frog analogy comes to mind. If you don’t define your “red line” in advance, you will never know when you pass it. Perhaps you have passed it already? The frog who decided to get out at 40 degrees Celsius before entering the water will survive. The frog who didn’t, will boil to death. It is also analogous to any form of negotiation. If you don’t have your boundary conditions defined in advance, you can never be successful. You must be able to say “NO”. I sincerely wish and hope that I am completely wrong here, but I get the feeling that most people haven’t defined their boundary conditions. By the way, I strongly recommend Christopher Brownings excellent book “Ordinary men”, where you will learn how anyone can become a demon. I am not afraid of the state and tyrannical Covid measures. More than anything, I am afraid of me.

What is your red line?