Is it OK to mock anti-vaxxers when they die or are dying?

 Personally, I don't mock people who have died or are dying (me being a kind-hearted liberal SNOWFLAKE), but some people do, and the question is, are they justified?

Consider:

Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary

BY MICHAEL HILTZIKBUSINESS COLUMNIST 

Excerpts:

Among all the ways that COVID-19 affects our lives, the pandemic confronts us with a profound moral dilemma:

How should we react to the deaths of the unvaccinated?

On the one hand, a hallmark of civilized thought is the sense that every life is precious.

On the other, those who have deliberately flouted sober medical advice by refusing a vaccine known to reduce the risk of serious disease from the virus, including the risk to others, and end up in the hospital or the grave can be viewed as receiving their just deserts.

The vaccine is not the cure to Covid, and mandates won’t work.

KELLY ERNBY, BEFORE HER UNVACCINATED DEATH FROM COVID


It may be not a little ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind.

But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled.

Nor is it wrong to deny them our sympathy and solicitude, or to make sure it’s known when their deaths are marked that they had stood fast against measures that might have protected themselves and others from the fate they succumbed to.

There may be no other way to make sure that the lessons of these teachable moments are heard.


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