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All bad things must come to an end
Sloppy decision making is confronting authorities with self-inflicted problems
In the news this past week: top tennis player Novak Djokovic affirms that he will not get a COVID-19 vaccine, even if it means missing several Grand Slam tournaments later this year, and thus forego the chance to become — according to statistics, at least — the best male tennis player ever. Also in the news, this past week: while nearly 3000 New York City employees just made the deadline of getting a first COVID-19 vaccine by 11 February, but more than 1400 were fired for failing to comply.
Many governments took the decision to require travellers to be vaccinated, and many employers made vaccination mandatory for their staff sometime during the course of last year. Amid the euphoria of the unexpectedly early availability of several very effective vaccines less than a year after the pandemic started, few questions were asked about these measures by few people. Vaccination was seen as a little short of the miracle that would allow society to shake off the restrictions everyone was getting tired of — perhaps even as the only route back to normality.
When the facts change…
Now, however, the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has unsettled some of the — perhaps…