To the editor:

Your “freedoms” end at others’ noses. Your vaccination and mask refusals threaten everyone else’s “freedoms” to stay safe and healthy. Your decisions are based on false, manipulated, deadly information. This is an aggressive assault on us all. Vaccines are safe for the vast majority, and face masks have proved effective in preventing virus transfer.

There’s a surge in younger patients, more children on ventilators, physicians making life-or-death appeals for vaccinations and masking, intensive care units filling up, pregnant women at risk for themselves and their babies, hospital nurses leaving from frustration and exhaustion.

This shouldn’t be a political decision. This surge is real. Stop placing faith in online chat rooms and manipulated, distorted values. More than 362,000 Kansans infected, more than 5,500 dead. If you won’t do it for yourselves, do it for others: children, loved ones, neighbors, doctors, nurses, teachers. Show some compassion and maturity.

Charley Crabtree,

Lawrence