Driving contagion

 "My health care is none of your business!"

To an extent, sure.

Your drinking is also none of my business - under certain circumstances.

If you drink yourself into a stupor in the privacy of your own home, that's your God-given right. If you do it repeatedly and bring on cirrhosis, I might note the cost you've thereby imposed on the medical system, but people make all sorts of choices that somewhat raise their risks of needing medical care. We don't want to go down the road of routinely policing behaviors where people increase their own risk of medical harm.

But if you get behind the wheel of a car, then your drinking is very much my business.

It's not that drunk driving is murder.

If you take a gun that you believe to be loaded, point it at someone, and pull the trigger, that's attempted murder. If the gun actually is loaded and if your aim is good enough for the distance you're at, then it will be murder in fact.

You had the intent to kill the person you aimed the gun at.

Driving drunk isn't like that.

First, most drunk drivers aren't intending to kill anyone. They simply want to get somewhere, and they tell themselves that they're not that impaired.

Second, it's pretty common for someone to drive drunk and not kill anybody. With enough luck, you can make it home from the bar with not even a scratch on your car.

Of course, you do have an elevated risk of having an accident, but maybe you just end up in the ditch with no more than some bruises.

Then again, you might kill yourself and nobody else - driving solo and smashing your car into a tree.

From here

Or you might injure or kill some family members or friends if they're in the car with you when you smash it into a tree.

 And of course, you might kill someone who had no connection to you except the dumb luck of crossing your path while you drunkenly drifted across the yellow line.

All of this lines up remarkably well with choosing to be unvaccinated in the midst of a pandemic.

It's certainly possible you won't get infected, and if you don't get infected, you won't infect anybody else. That's the drunk making it safely home.

Depending on your habits, it's possible in principle to get infected but not pass it on to anybody else. That's the drunk emerging from their crashed car (infected, but recovered) or driving solo and smashing into a tree (infected, then died).

But it's also possible to infect others. The ones most likely to be exposed to you are your family and friends, so that's the people in the car with you, who might emerge shaken up, or injured, or dead.

And you can infect people you don't know. It's possible to do that directly, as when you breathe your virus-laden breath on the person stocking the shelves in the grocery store. That's like drifting across the yellow line and hitting a stranger's car.

It's also possible to infect strangers directly, as when you infect your sibling, and your sibling infects their spouse, and their spouse infects a coworker. The drunk-driving analogy actually doesn't have a good counterpart to that, so in that regard, going unvaccinated presents a kind of risk that not even drunk driving creates.

"This is all bullshit! Because vaccinated people can also get infected and can infect others!"

It's true that vaccinated people can get infected and can infect others.

And a sober driver can cause an accident. They can be distracted, can fail to pull over when drowsy, can make a bad judgment call, can go too fast and lose control.

So it's not like sober drivers are 100% safe and all accidents are caused by drunk driving.

But drunk driving raises risks a lot, and it's easy to determine if it's happening, so we make rules against it.

In the presence of the Delta variant, our current vaccines provide imperfect protection, but it is real protection. Going unvaccinated against an epidemic disease raises the risks  to you and to your community.

Your drinking is not, in itself, my business.

But if you want to drive, then your drinking is my business.

You get to decide whether to get vaccinated. But just like drinking makes you temporarily lose the right to drive, being unvaccinated should come with limitations on what you're able to do.

And unless you're planning to stay home until community transmission is negligible, your vaccination status is my business, and everyone else's business as well.