The conflict between Neil Young and Joe Rogan over the
anti-vaccine propaganda Rogan spreads through his podcast triggered a heated
debate over the boundaries of free speech on platforms like Spotify and whether
one entertainer — Young — had the right to tell Spotify to drop another — Rogan
— or he should leave himself. But this clash was about something more than
free speech.
اضافة اعلان
As a journalist who relies on freedom of speech, I would
never advocate tossing Rogan off Spotify. But as a citizen, I sure appreciated
Young calling him out over the deeper issue: How is it that we have morphed
into a country where people claim endless “rights” while fewer and fewer
believe they have any “responsibilities”?
That was really Young’s message for Rogan and Spotify: Sure,
you have the right to spread anti-vaccine misinformation, but where is your
sense of responsibility to your fellow citizens, and especially to the nurses
and doctors who have to deal with the fallout for your words?
This pervasive claim that “I have my rights” but “I don’t
have responsibilities” is unraveling our country today.
“We are losing what could be called our societal immunity,”
argued Dov Seidman, founder of the How Institute for Society.
“Societal immunity is the capacity for people to come
together, do hard things and look out for one another in the face of
existential threats, like a pandemic, or serious challenges to the cornerstones
of their political and economic systems, like the legitimacy of elections or
peaceful transfer of power.”
But societal immunity “is a function of trust”, added
Seidman.
“When trust in institutions, leaders and each other is high,
people — in a crisis — are more willing to sublimate their cherished rights and
demonstrate their sense of shared responsibilities toward others, even others
they disagree with on important issues and even if it means making sacrifices.”
When our trust in each other erodes, though, as is happening
in America today, fewer people think they have responsibilities to the other —
only rights that protect them from being told by the other what to do.
When Rogan exercised his right to spread misinformation
about vaccines, and when Spotify stood behind its biggest star, they were doing
nothing illegal.
They were just doing something shameful.
Because the Rogan podcast episode that set off the
controversy, an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, who has gained fame with
discredited claims, completely ignored the four most important statistical
facts about COVID-19 today that highlight our responsibilities — to our fellow
citizens and, even more so, to the nurses and doctors risking their lives to
take care of us in a pandemic.
The first three statistics are from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s latest surveys. First, unvaccinated adults 18 years
and older are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID than fully
vaccinated adults. Second, adults 65 and older who are not vaccinated are
around 50 times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID than those who have
received a full vaccine course and a booster. Third, unvaccinated people are 20
times more likely to die of COVID than people who are vaccinated and boosted.
The fourth statistic is from a survey from the staffing firm
Cross Country Healthcare and Florida Atlantic University’s College of Nursing,
released in December. It found that the emotional toll and other work
conditions brought on by the pandemic contributed to some two-thirds of nurses
giving thought to leaving the profession.
A McKinsey study last month about the stress on nurses
quoted Gretchen Berlin, a registered nurse and McKinsey partner, as saying:
“Many patients, especially at the start of this, had only the nurses with them
for those final moments, and I am not sure that we have provided the
decompression space for what that does to an individual who has to see that and
support people through that over and over again. …the level of stress that
individuals are dealing with is going to have massive implications on
everyone’s well-being.”
My friend Dr. Steven Packer, president and CEO of Montage
Health and Community Hospital in Monterey, California, told me that many
hospitals today are experiencing an unprecedented 20 percent annual turnover
rate of nurses — more than double the historical baseline. The more nurses
leave, the more those left behind have had to work overtime.
“We have hardworking front-line staff in critical care
settings stretched thin caring for critically ill COVID patients — with the
overwhelming majority of those patients having a potentially avoidable illness
had they only been vaccinated,” explained Packer.
“It is disheartening and distressing.”
Especially when so many dying unvaccinated patients tell
their nurses, “I wish I had gotten vaccinated,” according to the American
Hospital Association.
But as Wired magazine columnist Steve Levy wrote last week
in a critique of Rogan’s three-hour Spotify interview with Malone, none of
these statistics were mentioned during that podcast.
“You can listen to the entire 186-minute lovefest between
Rogan and Malone and have no idea that our hospitals are overloaded with COVID
cases,” wrote Levy, “and that on the day their conversation transpired, 7,559
people worldwide died of COVID, 1,410 of which were in the United States. The
vast majority of them were unvaccinated.”
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