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Ostracized
I enjoy being around smart people; I learn a great deal from them and they help me feel smarter. But when smart people expound on ideas in a naïve and irrational fashion, it doesn’t make me feel smart. It makes me feel sad. That happened today.
This morning, I was to meet with a little group I formed to discuss Jewish topics on Zoom. Unfortunately, the internet wasn’t cooperating, and since we all live in the same area, we were all impacted. But today’s presenter was determined to make our meeting happen, so one of the women offered her home for our meeting. That sounded like a great and generous solution, except for one thing: one of our members hadn’t received her third Covid shot. She’d made that decision because of her concern regarding blood clots. The problem is that the other women in our group don’t want to be with her and the booster-shunner (let’s call her BS for short) knew it; she told me that she was being ostracized, but felt she shouldn’t have the third shot, particularly due to a medication she’s taking which can cause blood clots, too. So, she didn’t join us that morning.
The woman who was presenting picked me up in her car, so I took that opportunity to ask her if she was unwilling to be around the woman without the booster. She said yes. When I asked her why, she said that she thought everyone should have the third shot. When I asked her if she realized that BS was the one more in danger because of her more limited protection, she answered me by saying that was “just the way I felt.”
Right.
So after our meeting, I asked the other three women if they agreed, that BS shouldn’t be able to attend, and they said yes. When I asked their reasons, they told me that they could get Covid from her. I asked if they realized that they could also give her Covid. Well, it wasn’t the same, they said. Then one woman pointed out that they were medical professionals.
Okaaayyyy.
So I offered that people who had all three shots were also getting Covid. Oh, she said, but they have no symptoms, but BS might have Covid. I said, she doesn’t have symptoms either. So all of you or none of you might have Covid.
Silence.
After a moment, I said that I thought she shouldn’t be excluded, but I left it at that.
* * * *
On the drive home, the two of us in the car discussed how much we’d enjoyed being physically together. (We had discussed staying on Zoom or getting together at the end of the year, and all but one person wanted to stay on Zoom, which was fine with me.) Then I said, but if you all agreed to meet in person, what about BS? Oh, that’s right, she said. I wouldn’t want BS to be left out of the group. I immediately countered with a firm statement: BS will not be left out of the group.
* * * *
I’m very disappointed with the group members on a number of counts. First, they have ostracized BS because she’s decided not to be boosted. They are demanding that she conform to the authorities’ “guidelines.” They think they are on righteous high ground. And they are acting in this manner out of fear. I need to decide whether to let this go and just keep meeting on Zoom. Or if I need to make a statement. I asked BS what she thought, and she pointed out that they were unlikely to change their minds if I spoke further on the topic. She’s probably right.
I’m at a loss. So much for compassion.
[photo courtesy of Zoltan Tasi at unsplash.com]
Published in Culture
You win Jerry in this thread because I want to bow to Susan’s wishes
A thoughtful response, Marci. I don’t have an easy answer. I do wish the scientists would just go fly fishing!
No vaccines? No new therapeutics?
When should this fly fishing vacation have begin?….before or after the Salk polio vaccine, for example?
Heh.
But seriously, I think we all get the point of her comment. We’ve been pushed around for two years by people who claim the authority of “science.” And it’s been going on a lot longer, if we throw in the climate change crowd.
I share Susan’s exhaustion with experts who want to stick their narrow noses into broad public policy and tell us how to live based on their particular bugbears. (And an equal frustration with the actual scientists who fail to speak up as this goes on.)
Indeed. Regarding the current Covid issues, it strike me that public health is more like engineering than it is like science. There are always tradeoff, involving the consideration of multiple factors that may pull in different directions.
If you want to design an airplane, science will give you some useful principles and equations. But it won’t tell you what tradeoffs to make…these things are matters of engineering, informed by the customer’s needs and wants.
No aeronautical engineer ever said anything like: “The science says that we need to go with a two-engine approach with underwing mounting and use a lot of titanium in the airframe, and we’re going to need fly-by-wire controls.” Science doesn’t talk like that.
I forgive him NOTHING! See beagles, monkeys, orphan children , AIDS, ostracized much better doctors than him….
Yeah, loved it as well.
“Medical professionals” who aren’t persuaded by data and reason aren’t professionals, in my book, but that’s just me. I do have to ask though—when they were in school learning their profession, did they throw out or ignore data they didn’t think fit what they thought it should be?
But the actual scientists did speak up, and they got buried by Fauci and his cronies for being ‘fringe’, (now where have I heard that word before?)
I admire the way you are handling this, Susan. You are an inspiration.
@susanquinn this touches on some of what I was wondering: How will your goals for the group be best met? (Or maybe they just won’t be met, I don’t know.) Is this a like-minded group (apart from questions of Kung Flu)? How is the understanding of Judaism proceeding? Is it reasonable to believe that a mutual understanding of Covid is necessary to an exploration of Judaism? These are all things for Susan Quinn to decide.
I’m sorry I was not clearer. I was referring specifically to the scientists playing around with virus microorganisms. :-)
It is as wrong to ostracize Jerry for interpreting data in a certain way as it is for Susan’s group to ostracize the one lady for not getting a booster.
That said, it’s my understanding (and limited experience) that vaccines mitigate symptoms/impact of Covid, which means it’s very possible more vaccinated people are asymptomatic spreaders than we realize, but this does not matter in a world in which people have the option to also vaccinate themselves. (People either believe their own vaccines protect them from serious medical mishap, or they don’t. Someone else’s vaccine status is pretty irrelevant.)
In Susan’s situation, I would probably host a future meeting with the lady who didn’t get a booster, and the other ladies could come… or not. I would let that be their choice.
Anyway, I have known people who are vaccinated and who are not vaccinated get Covid. The severity runs the gambit, though omicron seems to be super mild for most individuals in *either* group unless one is old and/or fat and/or with another type of serious health issue.
To be clear, it has always been my opinion that People should assess *their own risks* and not impose any burdens on others, but per the side discussion in this thread, one should also understand how numbers work.
If you have even numbers for breakthrough and non vaccinated cases, you are probably making the case that non vaccinated people get infected more often than vaccinated people because the vaccinated pool is bigger at this point, ie what matters is not that 50 people were vaccinated and 50 people weren’t vaccinated in a pool of 100 people who got sick. What matters is the 50 who were vaccinated came out of a group of.. say… 1000, and the 50 unvaccinated came from a group of 100. (The rate of infection for each group is not the same, even if the numbers in the infected pool are equal.)
Does that make sense?
Also, I have not seen any great, persuasive evidence that one group “spreads less” than another group, though I do think it is clear that vaccines protect one group more than the other group. Recognizing this does not lead one to conclude that one should care at all about the risks someone else has decided to take or be able to dictate actions to anyone.
That’s all.
This brought to mind the old adage that when you owe the bank $1 million, the bank owns you. When you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank. In “othering”, as in many areas, at some threshold the tables are turned.
@susanquinn
Really interesting post, and the dehumanizing effects of the constant hectoring by “the experts” is really interesting to see but in kind of a horrifying way.
I have people in my acquaintance who will call ahead to church and ask who is working in the children’s area that Sunday. If someone is working who has been vaccinated, they will not leave their children in their care. I have other people in my acquaintance who refuse to be physically touched by anyone who has not been vaccinated.
Some day, historians will write and think about this time in history the same way we think about the Salem witch trials.
With the title of the post being “Ostracized” together with the quote above, I would think you’ve answered your own question.
Largely the discussion has been about the validity of these women’s objections. Well, despite being “medical professionals”, these women aren’t capable of assessing the risk themselves and, as you say, are simply following the crowd.
Following the crowd, conforming, feeling self-righteous and harboring irrational fear reminds us of what thing that happened in the 1930’s ? I would venture these ladies aren’t worth your time if they can’t accept being in the same room with this semi-vaccinated person given the very low risks involved.
Yes, but.
If Susan’s friends don’t trust the vaccines enough to allow a less-than-threefully vaccinated person in their midst, they are certainly not making a strong case for the ostracized person to get a 3rd shot. A two-shot vaccination makes a big difference; adding the 3rd shot makes a relatively small difference.
Yes, I suppose there is some miniscule amount of extra risk in allowing a two-dosed person among them, but there is also the risk of them getting hit by a meteor if they step outside to go to the gathering.
I assume that vaccinated persons transmit less than the non-vaccinated, because any infections they may get tend to be milder and of shorter duration, which means they are infectious for a shorter period. But I don’t expect the experiments that would prove it will ever be done. Those tests are extremely difficult and expensive to do, even in ferrets (which animal has been used for such experiments). But putting people in cages to do that kind of experiment tends to run into ethical issues.
I absolutely think the ladies are wrongheaded and… mean. It’s absolutely silly to refuse to be in a room with anyone if one is vaccinated herself. (And I wasn’t that particular pre-vaccines!!!! I resumed “normal” life in April 2020!)
My comment on numbers, however, was about reading statistics.
Exactly!
If the others are vaxxed and boosted, what are they concerned about?
They need to justify their concern, which would require admitting the vaccines are not effective.
You’ve had a wonderful conversation over the last 24 hours! Very thoughtful and enlightening. I especially appreciated those of you who reminded me that I should revisit the purpose of the group, so I have. My original purpose was to create a group where we could learn more about Judaism with each other. The second purpose was that our study would bring us closer to Judaism and to G-d; this second one was more my motivation.
From the beginning I decided to make our process as democratic as possible. They agreed on the monthly topics for the first year, and then for the second year; for this second year, a couple of them agreed to present on a topic. The majority also decided to continue to meet on Zoom. The wrench was thrown in when the internet went down during our usual meeting time. One person offered her home. It wasn’t until I called BS that I found out she wouldn’t be welcome because she wasn’t boosted. The others confirmed that.
So here is what I’m thinking: we will continue to meet on Zoom. I will continue to present on most of the topics (which I love to do because I end up learning a lot more when I am the presenter). If at any time the subject comes up to meet at a home, I will say that it’s fine with me as long as BS is included. Part of the reason I’m torn about ending the group is because the one person who loves it a lot is BS (who became a widow this past year). If they want to exclude her, it won’t happen, and I will tell them precisely why. I may even decide to disband the group at that time if we’re much farther along in time and they are still refusing to be with her.
If I hadn’t started the group, I might not stay with it. But I made a commitment. I still welcome your thoughts and suggestions.
Bravo, @She. This deserves to be comment of the week!
@SusanQuinn, you are lovely. Thank you.
The vax/mask mess is so real. And so sad.
And thankful you are getting stronger.
Bless you, Eleanor. Adversity can certainly make us stronger, can’t it? Thanks.
At least the Polio vaccine was efficacious against Polio.
I will not get the booster. I will also not vaccinate my daughter. Had I known about the risks to my son, he would not have been vaccinated.
Didn’t matter anyway as my daughter brought it home last month, now we all have had it.
The are refusing to spend time with someone who is just as inoculated as they were a few months ago.
I guess if you can’t keep up with the latest injection fashions you can’t sit at the cool girls’ table.
Susan, if your lady friends are as afraid of the virus as you say, then my guess is that they probably believe most anything that the government and the CDC tells them. If they are at all open to looking at an Internet article, may I suggest this:
https://www.city-journal.org/understanding-the-covid-odds
It is an article about your odds of dying from Covid if you have been vaccinated. It is based directly on a study done by the National Institutes of Health that covers the time period before Omicron, which was a more deadly time period than the current one. If your ladies knew how safe they were by being vaccinated, they would have no reason to fear your friend BS.
Key paragraphs from the article:
“Another survey found that most Democratic voters are so worried that they want to make it illegal for the unvaccinated to leave home. But before you don another mask or disinfect another surface, before you cheer on politicians and school officials enforcing mandates, consider your odds of a fatal Covid case once you’ve been vaccinated.”
“They tracked more than 1 million vaccinated adults in America over most of last year, including the period when the Delta variant was surging, and classified victims of Covid according to risk factors such as being over 65, being immunosuppressed, or suffering from diabetes or chronic diseases of the heart, kidney, lungs, liver or brain.”
“The researchers report that none of the healthy people under 65 had a severe case of Covid that required treatment in an intensive-care unit. Not a single one of these nearly 700,000 people died, and the risk was minuscule for most older people, too. Among vaccinated people over 65 without an underlying medical condition, only one person died. In all, there were 36 deaths, mostly among a small minority of older people with a multitude of comorbidities: the 3 percent of the sample that had at least four risk factors. Among everyone else, a group that included elderly people with one or two chronic conditions, there were just eight deaths among more than 1.2 million people, so their risk of dying was about 1 in 150,000.”
“Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you will die in a fire, or that you’ll perish by falling down stairs. Going anywhere near automobiles is a bigger risk: you’re three times more likely during a given year to be killed while riding in a car, and also three times more likely to be a pedestrian casualty. The 150,000-to-1 odds of a Covid death are even longer than the odds over your lifetime of dying in an earthquake or being killed by lightning.”
The study on which all this was based is published by the CDC and can be found here:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm
Thanks, Steve. I think I will send this article link to them. Then again, you can lead a horse to water . . .
Susan,
I haven’t read through all the responses to this post yet but I just want to commend you on the way you handled talking to the others in the group and how you expressed your opinion on the matter as well. The entire situation seems completely nonsensical to me but that is probably because it is so far removed from my personal daily experiences. Covid and covid restrictions do not cross my mind at all other than if I happen to taking a flight somewhere. I do appreciate how you dealt with the irrationality of certain members of your group and wish BS luck in finding others to meet with that aren’t gripped in what seems to be hysteria.
A pharmacist isn’t a medical professional but a medicine professional.