Time to set a snare trap at the Daily Beast

Senior editor Erin Gloria Ryan: smug, hateful, tattooed bitch

Time to get personal and nasty with the anti-vaxxers

They don’t care about us. So let’s talk about them, and the selfish reasons they need to get the jab.

Plenty of highly produced primetime segments attempting to hammer home the ugly reality of COVID-19 have aired over the past year and a half. Plenty of public officials have pleaded, and reasoned and asked nicely. We’ve heard from people who, through no fault of their own, have suffered COVID-related catastrophe due to the actions of others. We’ve heard from people who, completely because of their own negligence, have suffered the effects of COVID and wish they could undo it. There is a vaccine for the disease widely available, at no cost to anybody living in this country who chooses to get it. And yet, the pandemic persists. Perhaps it’s time for some new public messaging.

We can—and should—go further. It’s time for public health vaccine messaging to focus less on what getting jabbed means for society, and more on what not getting vaccinated can mean for individuals. In other words, it’s time to get disgusting. Anti-smoking campaigns and anti-drug campaigns have used upsetting medical descriptions and imagery in public service announcements. Why not go there with COVID?

In the past twenty years or so I’ve slowly abandoned my amused tolerance for these people, to contempt, to returning their outright hatred for me and this country. I don’t believe I’m alone in this, and I don’t see that there’s any going back.