Is It Wrong To Mock People Who'd Opposed Covid Vaccines and Then Died of Covid?

Is it okay to mock people who crusade against the Covid vaccine and then die of the disease? Does it convey the message about saving lives?

There are many websites devoted to this kind of mockery. Antivaxxer.com has stories and photos of anti-vaccine advocates who have died from the disease.

Two dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times were spurred by a recent case of tasteless taunting. Kelly Ernby, a former assistant D.A. and state assembly candidate who had advocated against the Covid vaccines, died earlier this month at the age of 46. She wasn'tvaccinated. There was a torrent of reaction on the internet after Ernby's death. There are more than 4,600 comments on her own Facebook page. Many other are not sympathy notes.

Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg wrote that he didn't understand how crowing over the death of others furthers useful debate or increases vaccination rates. Goldberg's colleague Michael Hiltzik published a column expressing the opposite. "Mocking anti-vaxxers' Covid deaths may be necessary." Michael Hiltzik is a business columnist for the L.A. Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize. You are not talking about the everyday people who don't get vaxed, sadly contract Covid, and die. Are you talking about people with a platform?

That's correct, Michael Hiltzik. I pointed out that the unvaccinated fall into three different categories. There are people who can't get vaccine for legitimate reasons, such as small children or people with medical problems. There's a group of people who have been tricked into resisting the vaccine, tricked by misinformation about the vaccine, and made to believe that preserving our freedom is important in the face of this Pandemic.

Those who spent the last few months or years of their lives crusading against sensible, safe policies such as vaccination and social distancing and what have you, and ended up paying the ultimate price for their own folly, are the real targets.

We have a cultural habit of not speaking ill of the dead, and looking at the good that they've done during their lives. I'm not sure if that's appropriate because so many of them have promoted reckless, dangerous policies.

They took innocent people with them.

Is mockery the only response? I wrote that every one of these deaths is a teachable moment. We haven't learned from the lesson that we should be learning from them.

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