Negative responses to last week's column imploring education officials to mandate vaccines for access to high schools this fall fit comfortably into the echo chambers of the "Liberty, And (No) Justice For All" crowd.

Among the favorites: "Stick to sports, turn off CNN,"  "we look more and more like China with our love for authoritarianism," "woke, virtue-signaling nonsense" and "cowards abusing power and has nothing to do with the greater good."

Translation: Individual liberties over the common good yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever. Sort of makes you want to break into a rousing version of "We Are Family," doesn't it?

As one journalist wrote recently, "for them, rejecting science and spurning authorities is a statement of moral outrage rather than an act of selfishness. And that sentiment is encouraged in a social media echo chamber that bonds the disconnected."

Several education officials reached out in appreciation of the column's sentiment, but yearned for more state guidance before issuing such a declaration.

"Very few school districts go out on a limb," one superintendent said. "We all want cover and we don't have it absent a position from the state."

And so I amend my previous request and ask local school districts to consider the following: I understand that the Food and Drug Administration has not issued final approval for the COVID vaccines, whose emergency use authorization makes it harder for the public sector to enforce mandates — especially about something as sacrosanct as an education.

I see less of an issue, however, with local school districts mandating proof of vaccination to play sports this season. The fundamental right to an education does not extend to the privilege of playing sports.

Sports are played in close proximity with physical contact among kids from different schools and towns. Statistics say that 54 percent of state residents ages 16-24 have been vaccinated, meaning that plenty of unvaccinated kids would be at risk not merely to contract COVID but spread it as well. The tentacles of COVID outbreaks are both obvious and concerning.

Hence, how can we even entertain the thought of athletics without proof of vaccination?

Example: Killingly and Waterford open the high school football season in September. State Department of Public Health numbers indicate that less than half of Killingly (47.7 percent) is fully vaccinated, compared to 67.4 in Waterford. If we accept that high school population vaccinations mirror the overall town numbers — I actually think it's a lot less, but work with me here for the sake of argument — how many Waterford parents honestly feel comfortable with their kids engaging in close physical activity with kids from a town where more than half of the people haven't been vaccinated?

Suppose, for example, a Waterford lineman, involved in physical contact on every play, lives with a family member whose age or health situation makes him or her more vulnerable to COVID? Are the lineman's family members comfortable with THAT risk?

I understand this argument will have zero effect on the segment of our society that loves quoting the Constitution — as if they've just gotten off the golf course with the framers. I humbly ask, however, about the part of the Constitution's preamble which features the words "promote the general welfare." What do y'all suppose the framers meant by that one?

Or why "life" comes before "liberty" in the Declaration of Independence?

I'd be lying to you if I said this is purely about vaccinations for me. This is about starting to infringe on the hallowed liberties of the unvaccinated and making their lives more uncomfortable. Sports and their tentacles/metaphorical richness are a great place to start.

And they can send their contrived moral outrage somewhere else. I don't really give a rat's rump about their liberty when weighed against the greater good.  Every day, we're told where we can and can't park. No smoking. Speed limits. Yelling fire in a crowded place. Those are all limits on their liberties, too. But it's also what makes a society civilized, socially considerate and aware.

USA Today quoted Harvard professor Michael Sandel last week as saying, "The resistance is not about public health, it's about politics. Even as the pandemic highlights our mutual dependence, it is striking how little solidarity and shared sacrifice it has called forth. The pandemic caught us unprepared — logistically and medically, but also morally. ... (It) arrived at just the wrong moment — amid toxic politics, incompetent leadership and fraying social bonds."

Emory University professor Steven Tipton, quoted in the same article, said, "It's an act of defiance. 'You can't make me.' And I will enact my own freedom even if it kills me and others around me who I love.'"

I often wonder what we'd make of Jonas Salk these days. A hero for finding the polio vaccine or another candidate as a S.A.D. (Socialist Agent of the Devil)?

Finally: Where are our state leaders here? Where is Gov. Lamont? One superintendent said school districts had 80 pages of school opening guidelines on July 17 of last year. Nothing to date for this year. This just in: School starts in three weeks.

I get that kicking the can down the road is a political pastime. But does anybody in Hartford understand the urgency here?

As the Denver Post reported last week: "In the absence of authority or fortitude to impose public health policies, federal leaders have largely deferred to state and local government. The result: a bewildering and inconsistent panoply of policies that vary from one jurisdiction to the next, and may change overnight."

It's not good enough anymore.

"The pandemic and dealing with it successfully does require cooperation. It also requires shared sacrifice," Lenette Azzi-Lessing, a clinical professor of social work at Boston University who studies economic disparity, told the Post. "And that's a very bitter pill for many Americans to swallow. The pandemic is revealing that our fates are intertwined, that the person in front of us in line on the grocery store, if he or she doesn't have access to good health care, that that's going to have an effect on our health."

Somebody out there: Make a decision. Make two. Or three. I say start with requiring vaccinations to play sports this fall. It's time the unvaccinated began to see consequences to their actions. Or lack thereof.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro