Stakeholders

"Vaccination is not a personal choice."

Well then, whose choice is it? The column ends with: "The vaccinated may be protected from COVID-19, but we can't protect ourselves from the consequences of our neighbors' bad choices." But this has always been the risk of having neighbors; only the completely isolated and unconnected have nothing to worry about from the undesirable choices of others. I'm pretty sure that once upon a time, Thag Simmons was greatly annoyed by the habit of the Neanderthals next door to lead stegosaurs back to the cave complex.

It's a sometimes disappointing fact of life that having a direct interest in what other people do often fails to make those other people accountable to us for the outcomes of their choices. And the reasons for this are many and varied. Sometimes, it's because there isn't an authority that's positioned to enforce some sort of accountability, and sometimes it's because people have been granted the freedom to make their own choices. Attempting to define "personal choice" as those things that only impact the one person who makes the decision is unworkable in a connected world. When people write sincerely about "desirability politics" and state that "attraction and dating is political" or seek to explain "Why your food choices are a political act," the space for purely individual, personal choices that no-one feels they have a stake in becomes vanishingly small.

And so, to a certain degree, people have learned to simply push those other self-appointed stakeholders aside. And I don't hold that against them. In my own understanding, other people don't owe me anything. The fact that the choices they make in their lives will have impacts on me may be unfortunate, but it's the way of the world. And for that reason, I try to avoid hanging anything of importance on other people behaving in a certain way; to do so would be to create a recipe for disappointment.

One of the problems with the shift from containing or managing the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak to eradicating the virus is that the latter goal leaves little to no room for defection from the group plan. But when it's unrealistic to expect that one can get 8 people to agree on what to order for dinner in the evening, it's orders of magnitude less rational to expect that tens or hundred of millions of people are going to act in unison. And that doesn't even bring partisan identities into the picture. In general, any plan that relies on masses of people all going along with the plan is likely not going to work out as hoped. That fact of life should always be an incentive to have other plans in place, ones that don't rely on as much coordination.