We’ve made the medical case for getting vaccinated against COVID-19 (you greatly reduce the chance of being hospitalized or dying) and the practical case (it’s free and the benefits greatly outweigh the risks and help the community reach herd immunity in the least painful way) and even the moral case (getting vaccinated isn’t just about you — none of us has the right to risk other people’s health).
Obviously, none of this reasoning is resonating with a good portion of Mesa County residents. Of the 15 largest counties in the state, we have the lowest vaccination rate.
But the longer we resist hitting vaccination goals, the more financial damage that’s being inflicted on everyone who lives here. So perhaps the pocketbook case for getting vaccinated can prevail where others have not.
Low vaccination rates are hurting efforts to grow the local economy. Economic development groups can’t recruit companies and companies can’t recruit employees because of the perceptions that arise over low vaccination rates. Opportunities are being lost now, but those can get compounded well into the future as high-vaccine communities cash in on job creation and create momentum that we cannot match.
We could be permanently behind the curve of an expected national economic expansion, washing away recent gains that have been made through a concerted effort to diversify the economy. In this version of “get the vaccine” logic, do it to contribute to an economy that pays a living wage and to create economic opportunity for the Grand Valley’s young people so that they don’t have to move away to find work.
Low vaccination rates result in high disease prevalence. As the virus looks for hosts in a community, it will find purchase in a low-vaccine community like this one, allowing for more genetic mutation, which is how new variants arise. If enough people aren’t vaccinated quickly, new variants may develop that are more infectious, more dangerous and may eventually evade vaccines.
The Delta variant is bad enough without this community incubating something worse. It’s putting more people into the hospital, which is forcing patient transfers to other locations — all of which contributes to unnecessary costs that we all bear.
Treating COVID-19 patients in an ICU bed is expensive — like $50,000 per day. It only takes a few non-vaccinated Medicaid and Medicare patients for the cost-shift tumblers to click into place. Hospitalization rates for the privately insured will rise and so will health-care premiums. The cost of transporting patients to Front Range hospitals (because ours are full of COVID-19 patients) will get backed into future insurance rates.
All of this could end if we took a more thoughtful approach to vaccinations. The irony of the small-but-vocal “Don’t tread on me” anti-vaccine contingent is that their cries of “freedom” incarcerate the rest of the community. We’re locked up, deprived of economic opportunity and lower health-care costs.
Yes, people have the right to take risks with their own safety. But as the British philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in 1859, your freedom is limited by the harm it could do to others. Refusing the vaccine not only risks other people’s physical health, but their financial health as well.
