Why Athletes Need to Lead the Drive to Vaccinate
We Have a Duty to Use Our Platform to Save Lives
A couple years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world the way the Chicxulub meteor collided with the Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out 75 percent of plant and animal life, including dinosaurs. If it were up to those contemporary dinosaurs refusing to get vaccines or denying the seriousness of the global pandemic, we’d lumber toward extinction like the previous custodians of the Earth.
Despite my decades of fighting the kind of voluntary ignorance that allows racism to still have such a stranglehold on our country, I’ve maintained a cautious optimism about people. I believe when given the opportunity most want to do the right thing. But that optimism has been greatly tested these past few months as I see so many people refusing to protect their families, their communities, and their country.
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Let’s start with these facts: 4.55 million people in the world have died from COVID-19, 688,000 of them in the U.S. To put it in perspective, US deaths from COVID-19 are more than twice that of US military deaths in World War II. And it keeps growing by about 7,500 deaths every day. So far, more than 42 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19, with about 120,000 more new cases each day.
Magic Johnson gets vaccinated against COVID-19.
COVID-19 has changed how we live, how we work, how we play, how we interact with family and friends. It has pummeled the economy with daily body blows, some of them below the belt.
And yet, we rise.
We rise because we have the intellectual ability to learn from the past and we have the instinctual drive to protect our children and preserve humanity. The world has faced the cruelty of pandemics in the past: the 14th Century’s Black Plague killed between 75 and 200 million people, the Spanish Flu killed between 17 and 100 million people, and so on. Each time we study, we analyze, we devise solutions. We do this through science. And each time, science has to fight the ignorance of the people it is trying to save as vigorously as it fights the diseases killing them. It’s like diving into the lake to save a drowning man who refuses to take off his ankle weights. Worse, he’s holding onto his children while he’s sinking.