February 4, 2022

Letters to the Editor

Submit a letter to the editor electronically | For our letter writing policy, click here

Who is really ‘COVID-shaming’? Criterion reader asks columnist

Had I submitted John Garvey’s Be Our Guest column “COVID-19 and scientism” published in the Jan. 28 issue of The Criterion for my Rhetoric and Composition class at the University of Notre Dame back in 1967—no, had I submitted it to my English teacher at St. Francis de Sales High School four years earlier—I would have received it back covered in red ink. It is nothing but one red herring, one straw man, one non sequitur, one ad hominem after another.

I’d like to know exactly who is “COVID-shaming?” His holiness Pope Francis, who on Jan. 10 of this year referred to vaccination against COVID as a moral obligation? Or people like Del Bigtree and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who falsely claim that vaccines cause autism, infertility and are “the new Holocaust?”

The intensive care unit staffs at all too many hospitals across the country, having spent literally years intubating COVID patients, desperately trying to keep them alive? Or the people on “Fox and Friends,” falsely claiming that it’s just a hoax? 

Who is “COVID-shaming,” really?

- J. Stephen Noe | Indianapolis

Local site Links: