More from our inbox:
To the Editor:
While many in the United States are choosing to reject or defer vaccination, U.S. citizens living overseas are desperately waiting to be included in President Biden’s promise to vaccinate all Americans. We need no special inducements. Many Americans live in countries where infections are rapidly escalating and no F.D.A.-approved vaccines are available, or where local governments prioritize their own citizens.
My husband, now 86, has underlying health conditions. Following a recent accident he can hardly walk. Flying to the United States for vaccination is not an option, even if the cost were not already prohibitive for a retiree living on Social Security.
As has already been done for State Department staff and dependents, I urge the Biden administration to quickly make F.D.A.-approved vaccines available to all Americans overseas. We remain subject to the U.S. tax code and we vote in federal elections, but are excluded from the protection offered Americans at home. We don’t deserve to be forgotten.
Loran Davidson
Huay Yai, Thailand
The writer is chair of the Pattaya chapter of Democrats Abroad Thailand.
To the Editor:
Given recent changes in the mitigation measures put in place to control Covid-19 transmission, like the easing of rules on masks, shouldn’t there also be changes in the border controls?
Most travel for non-U.S. citizens coming from Britain, where I am based, is barred, unless you are a diplomat or meet certain criteria for family members. I have not seen my 27-year-old son, who is living in California, for almost two years.
I have had two vaccinations already, reducing my ability to contract or spread the virus, but the United States is still treating me as high risk for entry, when I am much lower risk than many unvaccinated American citizens who are being allowed back.
Where is the sense in all this? Why not relax the Covid-related border controls gradually, allowing those who have been vaccinated to visit family members?
Simon Prutton
Winchester, England
Not Ready to Unmask
To the Editor:
Re “Under New Honor System on Masks, Americans Ask, ‘Am I to Trust These People?’” (news article, May 19):
New coronavirus mask guidelines from the C.D.C. have left Americans wondering whether they can trust one another. And it’s been a challenging year for trust.
I went to Walmart for groceries the other day. A solid 90 percent of the people I saw were wearing masks, most of them seniors (which means the vast majority were vaccinated).
People are not ready to shed their masks, and it’s not clear when they will be.
Mary E. Tyler
Williamsburg, Va.
A Nobel Laureate, on Ranked-Choice Voting
To the Editor:
“‘Ballot Exhaustion’ and Ranked Choice in the Mayoral Race” (news article, May 29) asserts that ballot exhaustion is a major risk of ranked-choice voting — the system, newly adopted in New York City, in which voters rank candidates, and unpopular office seekers are successively eliminated until someone is ranked first by a majority of voters.
A voter’s ballot is said to be exhausted if all the candidates she has ranked have been eliminated, so that she has no influence on the choice among the remaining contenders.
What this assertion ignores, however, is that ballot exhaustion was a far greater risk under the system that ranked-choice voting has replaced: plurality rule.
Under that old system (still used in most American cities, not to mention congressional races, presidential elections and so on), a voter got to name just a single candidate, and if that person didn’t win, her ballot was exhausted immediately; she had no chance to express her preferences over the other candidates.
At least ranked-choice voting gives a voter the opportunity to have her say. Whether or not she takes it is up to her.
Eric Maskin
Cambridge, Mass.
The writer, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor of economics and mathematics at Harvard.
The Risk of Nuclear War With China
To the Editor:
Re “The U.S. Nuclear War That Almost Happened” (news article, May 23):
The courageous disclosure by Daniel Ellsberg of the dangerous 1958 U.S.-China flash point over Taiwan provides a vivid warning of how easily we can precipitate a nuclear Armageddon by pursuing our strategy of heightened confrontation with China throughout the Pacific region.
Congress needs to oppose plans to greatly expand our military budget, including modernizing our deadly and overflowing stockpile of conventional and nuclear weapons. These expenditures, a down payment for a new Cold War, move us further from the global collaboration needed to solve our climate and other planetary emergencies evinced by the Covid pandemic.
Hopefully, learning from this grim historical revelation, our representatives should mobilize immediately to support the No First Use Act (H.R. 2603), introduced by Representative Adam Smith, to help avoid future predictable close calls involving nuclear weapons.
This would provide an opening for the United States and other nuclear-weapons states to move speedily to ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would do much to end the daily, too-invisible threat to our very existence.
Robert M. Gould
San Francisco
The writer is president of the San Francisco Bay chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Returning to Restaurants
To the Editor:
Re “What People Missed Most About Restaurants. (It Wasn’t the Food.)” (Critic’s Notebook, May 22):
Pete Wells’s article about appreciating restaurants for the chance meetings they provide couldn’t have been more timely for me, arriving as it did on the day after I ate dinner indoors at a restaurant for the first time since the pandemic began.
A woman I hadn’t seen in several years stopped at our table and told me she’d recently met an older woman I know slightly. We laughed at our considering the other woman “older,” as she may be only five years our senior.
She then said they had talked about how nice it would be for the three of us to go to lunch together once our older friend is ready to eat out. These are two people whom I think of fondly, but in no way could have summoned the energy to contact during Zoom life.
To think that they were speaking about me and even planning a possible in-person get-together felt like a gift. I’m looking forward to our lunch.
Ellen Davis Sullivan
Andover, Mass.
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June 04, 2021 at 12:08AM
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Opinion | Pleas From Overseas: Seeking a Vaccine, and Entry Into the U.S. - The New York Times
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