A recent letter in The Canyon Chronicle News section protesting vaccine mandates (“Cali Free Protests Against Vaccine Mandates,” The Canyon Chronicle, Nov. 12, 2021, No. 22), and a growing “common urgency to take a stand” against mandates, was inflated in its apparent intent to make it appear that local resistance to mandates is in fact “common.”
It is not common. Thankfully, a clear majority supports the contrary as millions of our countrymen are vaccinated and continue to do so.
Certainly people are at liberty to express their opinion and refuse vaccines but they are not at liberty to risk the lives of others when choosing to do so. I have lost two close friends and one relative to COVID. One was a frontline nurse who contracted COVID before vaccines were available. Her last wishes were that we all got vaccines. One decided the COVID outbreak was a liberal scam. When visited in the hospital, he bemoaned his choice not to get vaccinated and sadly passed away two days later.
Over three quarters of a million Americans so far have died of COVID.
This article presents its cause as a growing movement. Perhaps so, but by no means to a degree that gives legitimacy to this recent letter’s journalistic hyperbole.
—Philip Daughtry,Topanga
