In 2020? Sure. But in 2021?

How?

Public health bureaucrats have spent the past week counterprogramming the new CDC mask guidance for vaccinated people by stressing that the vaccinated are at almost zero risk. They’re being asked to mask not to protect themselves from COVID but to protect the muleheaded unvaccinated around them who are still in jeopardy.

I mean:

The most important facts for you to remember today:

Less than 0.001% of those fully vaccinated have had a fatal breakthrough case.

Less than 0.004% of those fully vaccinated have been hospitalIzed.

The vaccines work.

The vaccines are your best protection from the virus.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) August 1, 2021

The one unvaccinated cohort that isn’t eligible for the shot yet, young children, are also at near-zero risk from serious COVID complications. In which case how am I, a vaccinated person, encroaching on someone else’s rights by declining to wear a mask around them?

If you’re an adult then you have the same right I did to head down to your local pharmacy and get a shot that’ll protect you, just as you also have the right to refuse to do that. But in an age of free and plentiful vaccinations, that’s where your rights end.

Dr. Fauci on pushback against mask requirements, individual rights: "The fact is, if you get infected, even if you are without symptoms, you very well may infect another person who may be vulnerable,.. So in essence, you are encroaching on their individual rights." pic.twitter.com/R7aSX0JUPh

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 1, 2021

What about the rights of children to attend class without fear of being mass-infected by their idiot teacher who couldn’t be bothered to protect them by getting immunized? Yes, granted, even the vaccinated can infect others with the Delta variant, but evidence suggests that they’re infectious for a far shorter duration than the unvaccinated are and they’re less likely to get infected in the first place. Should kids be forced to stay home again in the fall to protect their unvaxxed teachers or parents? “Things are confusing right now,” said one Democratic official to Politico of the Delta era. “There is rancor and frustration in the air. School reopenings are going to be hard.”

They are? If so, it’s only because the rights of the unvaccinated trump everyone else’s rights to return to normalcy.

Even if kids get to go to class this year, it’s a cinch that they’ll be asked to mask up. Their right to function socially the way they did before the pandemic also must bow, it seems, to the right of unvaccinated adults to nurse their propaganda-fed superstitions about the vaccines. Karol Markowicz has had enough:

A study out of the UK released last week proved — once again — what we’ve known for more than a year: Kids transmit the coronavirus at a much lower rate than do adults. Epidemiologist Shamez Ladhani, who led the study, found that children “aren’t taking [the virus] home and then transferring it to the community. These kids have very little capacity to infect household members.”…

Study after disregarded study has shown that even unvaccinated children are safer than many vaccinated adults. Kids don’t spread COVID the same way. Schools aren’t infection hot spots. Kids rarely get sick from COVID and, when they do, it’s no worse than a cold.

We need to internalize this and stop listening to unhinged bureaucrats and journalists who frame children as little disease vectors. They aren’t. There’s a reason much of Europe didn’t mask kids under age 12 at all. It isn’t that they care about their kids less than we do, here in a country that starts masking at the insane age of 2. In fact, it shows Europeans care about their kids’ development so much they won’t force them to play bit parts in a grand psychodrama.

The only ones encroaching on anyone’s rights are the unvaccinated encroaching on the rest of the population’s right to live normally. And it’s ironic that Fauci wouldn’t go to the mat to make that point since some of the criticism he gets for his various foibles is obviously designed to distract from that one shining fact. We can debate the Provincetown study, whether the CDC should have required masking again because of it, whether Fauci’s messaging is confusing or contradictory, etc etc, but in the end this always comes back to the group of “skeptics” that refuses to be persuaded despite mountains of evidence of safety and efficacy to join the rest of us in the pursuit of rapid herd immunity.

Fauci said this yesterday too, which is less reassuring than the headlines his soundbite generated:

“I don’t think we’re gonna see lockdowns. I think we have enough of the percentage of people in the country — not enough to crush the outbreak — but I believe enough to not allow us to get into the situation we were in last winter. But things are going to get worse,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl on Sunday.

That’s good that we’re probably not going to see lockdowns again. But Fauci is clear here that that’s because he doesn’t think they’ll be necessary to limit transmission, as there should be enough population-wide immunity by winter to do that. The argument against lockdowns at this point shouldn’t turn on whether they’re unnecessary, it should turn on the fact that it’s morally unconscionable to ask a business owner to lose his livelihood in the name of protecting the willingly unvaccinated. That would be the supreme example of one person’s rights to not be infected (a right that doesn’t exist, by the way) encroaching on another person’s rights to live happily and prosper.

Here’s teachers union ghoul Randi Weingarten hinting again that more needs to be done before schools can reopen safely, like masking every child because some selfish people in her membership can’t be bothered to go get immunized.

AFT’s @rweingarten says “universal masking” is needed to keep schools open:

“We see the Delta variant be very transmissible. And so that’s why what masks do is masks stop transmission. So universal masking is going to be very helpful to keep kids safe." pic.twitter.com/mjH0Fg9IPB

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 2, 2021