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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2020 Baker City, Oregon 4A Write a letter news@bakercityherald.com OUR VIEW Don’t shun the flu shot If you haven’t done it in past years for whatever reason, now, more than ever, it’s time to get your fl u shot. Don’t take our word for it, Dr. Jeff Absalon, chief physician executive for St. Charles Health System in Central Oregon, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the best way to help limit COVID-19 is fl u prevention. It’s so critical now, that the Oregon Health Authority has ordered seven times the normal number of fl u vac- cinations. It is concerned how the fl u might exacerbate COVID-19 infections, according to a recent article in the Bend Bulletin by health reporter Suzanne Roig. The CDC has recommended people get a fl u shot by the end of October, since it takes 2 to 4 weeks for the vaccine to become effective. One can still get a shot af- ter that, Dr. Absalon says, but the optimum time is now. Most pharmacies, large grocery store chains and health care clinics are offering the shot for those carrying insurance. And, Central Oregon Public Health teams are traveling the state to give shots to those who cannot afford the cost. According to the CDC, the fl u has sickened 9 million to 45 million people a year with 39 million becoming ill last year and as many as 62,000 dying from the illness. (COVID-19 deaths have topped 200,000 in the U.S. alone). Dr. Absalon noted in a recent interview with The Bul- letin that last spring there were COVID-19 cases where a person was co-infected with the fl u. A fl u shot is one way to avoid that dire situation. If you still have doubts, look to the Southern Hemi- sphere. Flu season in the Southern Hemisphere is from June through September, as it is winter there now. Aus- tralia, for example, has had a mild fl u season for two very important reasons, Dr. Absalon said. The fi rst was the country imposed very strict social distancing regu- lations on its citizens at the outset of COVID-19. Then, the government was very aggressive about ensuring citizens received a fl u shot; some three to four times the amount got the shot than the previous year. If the U.S. follows suit, a mild fl u season will help reduce that distraction from fi ghting COVID. Meanwhile, as far as a COVID-19 vaccine for the U.S., the CDC predicts it will not be available at the earliest until mid-2021, most likely after fl u season abides. Again, one more reason to take the shot. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald. Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the Baker City Herald. Democrats are in a tough spot By Jon Healey What’s a worse look for a politician: hypocrisy or extremism? For Senate Republicans, the risk is that voting on a Supreme Court nomi- nee now will tag them as ends-justify- the-means hypocrites. That’s because four-and-a-half years ago, they refused even to hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s fi nal Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, proclaiming that confi rmation votes shouldn’t hap- pen in an election year. As Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) put it after Obama nominated Garland in March 2016, “Our next election is too soon and the stakes are too high; the American people deserve a role in this process as the next Supreme Court justice will infl uence the direction of this country for years to come.” President Donald Trump now says he plans to offer his nominee on Sat- urday, after nine states have already started in-person voting on his reelec- tion bid. But Gardner, like the vast majority of his colleagues, believes it’s OK to proceed because the Senate and the White House are controlled by the same party. This is reminiscent of Jean de La Fontaine’s fable of the wolf and the lamb, whose acidic moral was that those with power always make the better argument. History is written by the winners; the rules are set by the majority. There are no principles here beyond the notion that it’s important to use the power at one’s disposal; in 2016, that meant blocking a vote on Obama’s nominee, and in 2020, that means quickly considering Trump’s. (And please — if you’re going to play the rule-of-law card that Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah played, that makes what your colleagues did in 2016 only look worse.) Yet Republicans may also see a chance here to provoke Democrats into threatening a bunch of changes that delight the folks on the left wing but unsettle people in the middle. That would play right into Trump’s effort to portray his November opponent — former Vice President Joe Biden — and congressional Democrats as puppets of the most extreme voices in their party. Sure enough, some Democrats and liberal pundits are casually suggesting a cascade of retaliations next year if the Letters to the editor • We welcome letters on any issue of public interest. Customer complaints about specifi c businesses will not be printed. • The Baker City Herald will not knowingly print false or misleading claims. However, we cannot verify the current Senate votes to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These include packing the Supreme Court with four Biden appointees to turn a 6-3 conser- vative majority into a 7-6 liberal edge; eliminating fi libusters in the Senate on legislation, allowing a new Demo- cratic majority to enact whatever it pleases by a simple majority vote; ad- mitting Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states, which could add four Democrats to the Senate; and even fi nding a way to neuter the Electoral College so that the presidential nomi- nee who receives the most votes across the country will win the election, signifi cantly increasing the infl uence of Democratic-dominated California and New York at the expense of a slew of red fl yover states. Many Californians would no doubt consider these proposals sensible and even overdue. The Electoral College is profoundly undemocratic; voters in lightly populated states have more sway than voters in densely populated ones. The fi libuster is undemocratic too, and has been routinely used in the last couple of decades not just to stop presidents from enacting much of their legislative agendas, but also to thwart action on major, complex issues (see, for example, immigration). And the Americans who live in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico should be able to decide for themselves whether to opt for statehood. Plus, there’s the whole Garland thing, which has stuck in Democrats’ craw like the sting of a sucker punch. One person’s bold change, however, is another person’s scary attack on American institutions. It’s easy to imagine how ideas like nuking the fi libuster and expanding the Supreme Court will play out in Republican campaign advertisements, rallies and on cable news shows: “If you elect Democrats, they will trample on tradi- tion and damage our great American institutions, and for what? Because they want power!” Whether this line of attack will move many voters is an open question. But remember, Republicans’ goal this election is mainly to play defense on behalf of Trump and the Senate GOP majority. And one time-tested way to do that is to make the status quo seem safer than change, typically by making the challengers seem like radicals. Ginsburg’s death left Democrats in a tough spot. With the fi libuster removed on presidential nominees (a process started by Democrats in 2013 and completed in 2018 by Republi- cans), they have no brakes to press on whomever Trump nominates, regard- less of how divisive a confi rmation at this point would be. That’s why a number of analysts (on both sides of the political spectrum) have called on Democrats to up the stakes by making big threats, in the hope of making Sen- ate Republicans blink. And that may be exactly what Sen- ate Republicans want. accuracy of all statements in letters to the editor. • Writers are limited to one letter every 15 days. • The writer must sign the letter and include an address and phone number (for verifi cation only). Letters that do not include this information cannot be published. • Letters will be edited for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. Jon Healey is the Los Angeles Times’ deputy editorial page editor. Mail: To the Editor, Baker City Herald, P.O. Box 807, Baker City, OR 97814 Email: news@bakercityherald.com Pandemic’s potential for permanent effects The pandemic has wrought such havoc on society that it’s hardly unreasonable to wonder whether life will ever seem quite the same, at least for those who have lived through it and were old enough to form memories from this strangest of years. The instinctive answer, it seems to me, is no. Which is to say that 2020 will leave indelible scars, as stubbornly resistant as the scrawls on a wall made by a toddler who gets hold of a permanent marker. The year certainly seems like a milestone. The key word is “year.” COVID-19 is not a singular event comparable to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the moon landing on July 20, 1969, or the assassina- tion of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That trio defi nes the notion of the “where were you when it hap- pened?” question, at least for the past several generations. But none of those comparatively brief episodes imposed such sweep- ing effects on our everyday lives as the pandemic has done over these past months. If you don’t frequently fl y on commercial airlines — and most JAYSON JACOBY of us don’t — then it’s not likely that 9/11 dramatically altered your routine. I don’t mean to minimize the aftermath of that awful September day. Almost 3,000 people died. And thousands of American military members were killed later as a result of our response to the attacks. Many others still bear the scars of their service, both physical and psychological. But those effects, though tragic, are still confi ned to a relatively small group. COVID-19’s reach has been so much wider, insinuating itself into almost everyone’s life, and often in profound ways. Many activities so common we hardly thought of them in any deep way now seem strange. To accomplish a task as prosaic as buying a gallon of milk we have to don a mask and follow arrows taped to grocery store aisles. We scuttle around when we’re in public, lest we get too close to some- one and potentially offend with our exhalations. These peculiarities, and many others of a similar nature, are not likely to persist, I think. I’m confi dent we will conquer the coronavirus in much the same way that we have done with so many other once common communicable diseases. I don’t expect that years from now — or even, I hope, months — we’ll still be wearing masks most days and avoiding parties and oth- er gatherings that once brightened the humdrum span of our days. And although it might take many years, or even a generation, before society treats COVID-19 much as we now do the seasonal fl u — an infection we try to avoid but to which we do not ascribe a malevolence it does not deserve — I believe we will eventually get there. But about other changes that the pandemic has provoked, and whether their relevance will also gradually dissipate, I am less certain. Working from home is hardly a new concept, of course. Yet what we once called “tele- commuting” has in 2020 become, for many types of businesses, the dominant form rather than the outlier. And since it seems likely that technology will in the future make this transition easier rather than more diffi cult, I wonder whether the shift to home offi ces will, to a large extent, continue even after the pandemic and its precautions have ceased. Education could have a similar future. Online classes, from the elemen- tary level to college, also were an option before COVID-19. But it seems to me likely that our current experiment with man- datory “comprehensive distance learning” will persuade some parents of younger students, and college students themselves, to stay with it even when traditional classes resume. (I encase “comprehensive dis- tance learning” in quotation marks, the scarlet letter of punctuation, because “comprehensive” in this context is a word to warm the cold heart of a propagandist, for whom the way to sweeten the ersatz is to glaze it with a glistening adjective.) In the eternal contest between convenience and quality, only a fool would bet on the latter. Among other examples, this explains in part why there are an awful lot more McDonald’s than there are steakhouses. I’m not a sociologist — it’s a subject I managed to avoid even in college, where it’s ubiquitous on undergraduate transcripts — but I suspect that the pandemic, by keeping so many of us isolated in our homes or limiting our interac- tions to a small group of friends or relatives, has created a pent up demand for immersing ourselves in crowds. I greatly hope that soon theaters and sports stadiums will again teem with humanity, that when we go to a restaurant we will have to nearly shout to compete with the din of a dozen conversations. COVID-19 has taken so much from us. We have lost irreplaceable mo- ments with those we love. Many have lost their livelihoods. Immeasurably worse, many have lost their lives. But the tragedy would be greater yet if we allowed the virus to forever rob us of our sense of com- munity, the unique joy that comes from being together. Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.
