In a year-plus of depressing headlines, this one from The New York Times on Monday was among the dreariest: “Reaching “Herd Immunity” Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe.”

Really, America? Is this the best we can do? You know what this means, right, all you vaccine resisters out there? It means the day that you all can’t wait for the most, the day when nobody wears masks and returns to their normal dining and shopping habits (because they’re no longer afraid of getting the Covid and dying an agonizing and lonely death) gets further away.

Just last week, County Exec Pat Ryan bemoaned the waning demand for the vaccine among residents, saying it was “not a good sign” and would delay herd immunity. (As of last week, 51.3 percent of the population has received at least one dose.)

Because not enough people are getting the vaccine, the coronavirus will continue to live, and mutate into more contagious and deadlier variants. Mask-wearing will become a permanent thing — not all bad for those of us who don’t like to be recognized in public, but we think even those types would admit it’s a pain to have to wear one all the time. Healthcare costs, inflamed by the expense of a constant stream of thousands of Covid sufferers needing to be in the ICU, will only rise faster.

And honest to God, if your personal Venn diagram shows you against both vaccination and gentrification, you’re a goddamned idiot. The longer this thing goes on, the more people with more money than us move here. Another year of the pandemic and it’ll be so bad in Kingston that unless you’re pulling down six figures, your ass is moving to Kansas.

As Americans, we’re used to the idea that we can do whatever we want, say whatever we want and no one can make us do anything we don’t want to or make us shut up. That’s why we had the revolution, right?

Well, not exactly, but that’s the subject for a later editorial. In every society, a line is drawn, drawn again and constantly redrawn between the rights of an individual and that individual’s obligation to society. In general, your Editorial Team favors freedom over restriction with almost-extreme prejudice, but we are always careful to watch where somebody exercising a right results in someone else getting needlessly harmed. We cannot recall a time in our recent history where someone claiming something (vaccine refusal) as a right puts society at such a severe risk. COVID-19 is a World War II-level global emergency — Americans of that era put aside whatever misgivings they had about that conflict, and there were many, and sacrificed a great deal to win that war. The selfishness so many have sadly shown over the last 14 months shames us before our ancestors.

The severity of this emergency, we think, justifies severe sanctions against those who won’t get vaccinated. (Yes, we believe if there are medical reasons why someone cannot get it, they don’t have to get it. Religious reasons, not so much.) We’re all for employers, schools and public places making vaccination mandatory for entrance. If necessary, carrots, in the form of savings bonds like they did in West Virginia or perhaps here in upstate free lottery scratchers, should be used to complement the stick.

But we’re prepared to go even further. Just as a person is allowed to cut off a gangrenous limb lest it fatally infect the whole body, should not society be allowed to cut off, or at least isolate, those members who, through their ignorant or misguided intransigence, threaten to fatally infect others?

Global warming is a real tragedy and will doom our species far more thoroughly than any pandemic. However, its gradual de-icing of Greenland is making space for the vaxxophobes to go and set up their own little society and live their lives as they see fit without endangering everybody else. We only ask that they take the sex-offenders, flat-earthers, disciples of Q and whoever the hell it was who made Kylie Jenner a billionaire with them.