This is an opinion column.
I’m so confused.
Does Gov. Kay Ivey want Alabamians to stop choking our hospitals, or not?
I once thought she did.
Does she want to give our already stressed and strained healthcare heroes a well-deserved break, or not? Does she want to free ICU beds for people needing intensive care for something other than COVID-19, or not? Does she want to prevent another COVID-infected Alabamian from being transported more than 100 miles from their home because there’s no room for them in hospital after hospital after hospital, or not?
I once thought she did.
Heck, does she want Alabamians to be healthy, to live? Or …
I once thought she did. I truly did.
That was back in August when she implored us all to get vaccinated, begged us all to get vaccinated, when she called vaccinations “the greatest weapon we have to fight COVID” (yeah, she sure did). She said the unvaccinated were “letting us down” as COVID hospitalizations and deaths soared to their highest since those frightening months before vaccines
Today, the unvaccinated still represent 83 percent of the nearly 2,500 Alabamians hospitalized due to COVID and 90 percent of those from whom it squeezes their final breath.
We are two nations now: One vaccinated, one stubbornly not. The latter are 4.5 times more likely to become infected, 10 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 11 times more likely to die from the coronavirus, a new study found.
“We’ve got to get folks to take the shot,” the governor resoundingly declared that day. She got so flummoxed at one juncture she took a verbal switch to the unvaccinated, admonishing them for “choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain”.
Pain we all feel. When we learn of another unnecessary death. Of a parent. Of a young person. Of a pregnant mother. Of the child just out of her womb.
Pain we feel for Andrew, the valiant Hoover teen who decided for himself he wanted to get vaccinated yet feared how his anti-vax parents might react. Fear sadly justified when dad, after Andrew raised his voice to the parents as they argued over the shot, grabbed his son’s shirt screamed: “You’re not getting this damn vaccine.” (Thankfully, Andrew’s parents relented and the next day the dad quietly signed the consent form and allowed his son to get vaccinated.)
I truly thought Ivey felt our pain, thought she’d do all possible to relieve our beleaguered and overwhelmed health workers. To relieve us.
I was wrong. Clearly wrong.
Ivey doesn’t really want you to get vaccinated against COVID-19—not if it means bucking the partisan pony. If it means putting people (people whom she was elected to represent) above politics. Putting non-sensical “freedoms” above freeing us all from the deadly grip of a virus that is winning. Against the unvaccinated.
I know that now.
I know that after she leaped over her desk—figuratively, of course—and went after President Joe Biden like a UFC cage fighter for announcing the federal government would require federal employees and federal contractors to be vaccinated and ask the Labor Department to require private companies with more than 100 employees to ensure workers are either vaccinated or submit to weekly drug tests.
We know that after she boasted Tuesday of beating Facebook over banning her campaign page for violating community standards. It was removed then restored after an appeal. (Facebook later called the removal a mistake.) “We fought back and won,” Ivey blared in a tweet from her campaign account. “Evidently, they’re upset that I said I’m standing in the way of President Biden to protect Alabamians from this outrageous overreach …”
Our governor went all whoop, whoop over her campaign ad—on the day after the Alabama Department of Public Health added 40 Alabamians to its tally of deaths due to COVID . Yeah, she sure did.
If Ivey were only as vehement—as vehement as she was a month ago, disingenuous as it may have been—about saving Alabamians from themselves, about relieving the men and women on the front line of what remains a pandemic unvaccinated nation.
If only she cared. Of which I am no longer confused.
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More columns by Roy S. Johnson
UAB physician on unnecessary COVID deaths: ‘It’s like watching people walk off a cliff’
Political divisiveness over Afghanistan dishonors all who died on 9/11
Alabama Republicans, don’t dare bring dreadful Texas abortion law to our state
Bessemer student-led walkout over COVID concerns is new children’s crusade
Woodfin’s campaign manager shares secrets behind the landslide
In Montgomery change is spelled with a small ‘c’
Y’all boo’d your idol (Trump) when all he did was ask you to take vaccine
Thankfully, state leaders are filling void left by Invisible Gov.
Roy S. Johnson is a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of 2021 Edward R. Morrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable”, co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Press-Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com, follow him at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj.
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