To the Editor:

Nothing has “fueled” the pandemic more than anti-vaxxers who stubbornly refuse to put community before self, and fight any and all mask mandates, endangering others so they can be “free.” The insistence that there are “positive” aspects of the pandemic that somehow are not being reported by a capricious and negative-minded press seems spectacularly off-base to me [“The media is to blame for COVID hysteria,” Letter to the Editor, The Altamont Enterprise, Jan. 6, 2022].

The Omicron variant emerged less than two months ago. Even if its effects are apparently less dire than Delta, the fact remains that hospitals are flooded with cases, long COVID remains a risk, and multiple systems are breaking down daily because so many people are out sick from work.

Just look around, examples are everywhere as Omicron continues to race through the population in New York State, making the unvaccinated sick so they tax strained health-care workers, but those who have done the right thing and been inoculated far less so (which is just one example of how vaccines actually work).

Also, people 65 and older are not exactly dispensable, nor are the immuno-compromised. They need to be able to live their lives, too. The only way to fully protect them is to achieve something closer to herd immunity, which is impossible to do when so many selfish and ill-informed people continue to resist getting vaccinated, and encourage further, and possibly more lethal, variants to mutate and take hold.

Blaming the media instead of encouraging widespread vaccination and following the science — which is going to be fallible and changeable and imperfect, since we are continuing to learn about the coronavirus as the pandemic keeps unfolding — is the very definition of finger-pointing in the wrong direction.

Katherine Dieckmann

Westerlo