It’s Not Segregation

Don’t like restrictions? Get vaccinated.

Unless your social media feeds are a Covid-conscious monolith, you’ve likely seen posts referring to the restrictions on individuals unvaccinated for the virus as “segregation.” The unvaccinated are livid that because they refuse to get the shot, they are increasingly barred from concerts, sporting events, restaurants, and- perhaps one day soon- air travel.

These restrictions, they argue, are tantamount to black Americans being forced to reside, learn, and receive medical care (among other things) separately from their white counterparts, or European Jews being expelled from their homes and relocated to crowded, unsanitary ghettos.

To be fair, Oxford defines segregation as “the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or being set apart.” I can certainly understand how anti-vaxxers might think this label applies to them. Let’s not pretend, however, that the theoretical definition of segregation is quite so simple given the (ahem) practical examples of segregation throughout our country’s, and the world’s, checkered history.

The infamous example of forced segregation imposed on black Americans is so synonymous with the term that the Merriam-Webster definition actually takes it into account, explicitly mentioning separation by “race, class, or ethnic group.” To argue that segregation can take place without these or similar factors involved seems, at best, naïve. And what do race, class, and ethnic group have in common? They are, with possible exceptions for class, immutable.

Black Americans cannot change their race. Hispanic Americans cannot change their ethnicity. Even economic class is often unlikely to change significantly and for the better over the course of a lifetime. It has, time and time again, been made illegal to segregate or otherwise discriminate based on factors out of a person’s control.

Vaccination status is no such factor. Separating restaurant patrons on the basis of race is both morally wrong and illegal, but claiming segregation when the same patrons are separated from their unvaccinated counterparts is erroneous. Changing one’s race is impossible. Changing one’s vaccination status is as simple as casting off the misguided need to claim personal freedom for personal freedom’s sake and walking into a pharmacy. The privileges requiring proof of vaccination (yes, indoor dining and live theater are privileges, not rights), unlike so many hard-won civil rights victories, become instantly attainable.

Far too many Americans of all walks of life- over half of the population- have now been vaccinated without incident to claim that the shot poses serious health risks worth refusing for. There is only upside to being fully vaccinated, in the form of all the social and cultural activities that make life worth living and that were so sorely missed in the early days of the pandemic. If medical freedom is paramount to you, by all means, dig in your heels and keep refusing the vaccine, but you can’t claim segregation and expect sympathy for your plight from the rest of us.

We won’t be able to hear you over the chatter in the restaurant where we’re grabbing dinner before the show anyway.

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