hankyoreh

Hwang Joon-bum

By Hwang Joon-bum, Washington correspondent

With preparations underway for the fall semester in schools a little over a week from now, the Fairfax County School Board in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where I currently live, advised that all students and teachers will be required to wear masks indoors.

It also recommended that they get vaccinated for COVID-19 as soon as they are eligible, adding that vaccine clinics would be provided at some schools. It’s sad to think that those children will have to stay in masks all day long, but this is a necessary and justifiable measure to allow them to return safely to in-person classes after more than a year of online courses at home.

Yet, in other parts of the US, controversy has been raging. Republican governors in states like Florida and Texas have issued executive orders prohibiting mask mandates.

This has drawn protests from school districts within those states, which have moved to require masks on their own. The controversy has been compounded as teachers have filed lawsuits objecting to this.

Vaccinations have been the focus of endless debate. Despite facing international criticism for its “vaccine selfishness,” the US has been stockpiling vaccines and using all sorts of incentives to encourage people to get inoculated. In the capital city of Washington, iPods and iPads have been offered as gifts to students who get the jab ahead of the new semester.

Yet nationally, only 50% of the US population has been fully vaccinated. It’s infuriating to watch from the standpoint of South Korea, which has a full vaccination rate of just 15.7%, according to Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency figures as of Wednesday, amid a shortage of vaccines.

Some Americans are dead set against vaccines. Opinion survey results published by the AP in mid-July showed that 80% of those who had not received a jab did not intend to get one in the future.

The past two weeks have seen new daily COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths double in the US, with 99% of fatalities among the unvaccinated — yet it doesn’t seem to register at all with this group.

The reasons have to do with questions about the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness, distrust of the government and health experts, and a lack of access to accurate information. The biggest reason of all is the belief that both vaccines and masks are matters of personal freedom that the state and other third parties should not intrude in.

Of course, masks and vaccines are also about considering and protecting others besides ourselves. Communities can only be sustained when everyone is pitching in with disease control effects to build our immunity. When it comes to personal freedoms and the public good, the mask and vaccine deniers in the US are only concerned about the former.

Some have expressed anger toward these people, insisting that the government needs to make masks and vaccines mandatory. But it’s unclear whether the federal government has the authority to issue such a mandate for all Americans, and the administration of President Joe Biden has so far been only making recommendations, while leaving the decisions about “mandates” up to state governments. Some state governments, such as the one in California, have been requiring vaccinations only for government employees or employees of schools and healthcare facilities.

In South Korea, it’s seen as natural for people to think about both themselves and the community and cooperate with vaccinations and mask-wearing, even without the state legally requiring it.

But it’s a different situation in the US, where personal freedom is regarded as the paramount value inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Moreover, attitudes about COVID-19 and disease control measures in the US have become politicized into extremes since early in the pandemic last year, with former President Donald Trump at the center of it all. The stakes of this political battle among adults are the health of the children preparing to return to classes.

Michael Sandel, a Harvard University professor renowned for his book “Justice,” referred in an interview with the school’s college newspaper last year to issues such as divisive politics, incompetent leadership, and weakened social cohesion.

“The pandemic caught us unprepared,” he said.

His message is that it’s impossible to respond cohesively to COVID-19 at a time when inequality has worsened and antipathy toward ruling elites has deepened. The US is showing right now how difficult it is to overcome COVID-19 through vaccines and money alone.

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]