Vaccines

In the news here in the USA you may have heard of "anti-vaxers." They don't want to get a Covid shot because they "don't trust" the vaccine. Now if these anti-vax people were medical scientists, their distrust in the vaccine would give me pause. But they're not scientists, they're people who get their vaccine news from sources like far-right TV news and unknown people on the Internet. Those news sources are exactly who you shouldn't trust, because they're not medical scientists. 

I've gotten vaccines my whole life, starting with smallpox—a disease that used to be a scourge but is now extinct thanks to the vaccine. I got the Salk polio vaccine, and I got the Sabin polio vaccine. Polio was another scourge. Just look at an old photo of a room full of "iron lung" machines with a human head sticking out of each machine, their bodies lying paralyzed inside the "iron lung" machines.

I've gotten so many tetanus shots that I long ago lost count. I got my first shot at age six after I was walking home from school and a German Shepherd lying on a front porch jumped up and ran up to me and bit me. When I was 13 I got a paper route, and I was bitten by collies and German shepherds and mixed-breed dogs of various sizes. Never mind rabies; I don't think anyone even considered that disease, but a new tetanus shot awaited me after each dog bite. 

I get a flu shot every fall. I've had the flu and a bad case of flu is not a picnic. The last time I had flu I lay in bed with a high fever. I took off all my clothes, the better to cool down, and I lay on top of the sheets all night. The fever broke during the night, but the illness left me very weak. My mother had an expression, "weak as water." After that night of sweating out the flu, I understood what she meant. I was truly weak as water, and I've gotten a flu shot every fall after that. 

I had a vaccine shot for typhus and a vaccine shot for yellow fever. I've forgotten the names of all the vaccines I've had. So when the Covid vaccine became available, I wanted it. Covid is dangerous; it's a killer disease. Sure, you might live through it with only few symptoms, or you might struggle to breathe for days before dying alone in an ICU bed, but who wants to roll those dice?!

I've been vaccinated for pneumonia and for shingles. Some vaccines were free, and some required payment. The Covid shot is free, and I got two of them. If there's a booster, I'll be in line to get that, too. Thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, have labored to make a Covid vaccine that is safe and effective, and the U.S. goverment is paying for them. Get the shot!

Unvaccinated people are playing a dangerous game that there's no need to play. There's no upside and there's only a downside. If you're unvaccinated and you get Covid, you may be one of the lucky ones with mild or no symptoms. But you may pass your Covid on to another unvaccinated person who dies. That person maybe be a father, the sole financial support for his family. Or that person may be a young mother raising her babies. The unvaccinated need to think less of their fears and more about the people they may kill.

When Covid was new, I thought vaccine shots should be up to the individual. But it has spread and evolved and has become very dangerous and may mutate into something even more dangerous if we don't stop it. So many people have gotten Covid and so many have died from it that I no longer think that any responsible person can make the decision to not get the shot. Not getting the shot is not unlike shooting a gun into the air and letting the bullet fall wherever it may. That bullet might kill someone and it might not. That's why the law forbids shooting into the air. 

The person who can safely get a Covid shot and refuses to do so may end up having blood on his hands, whether or not he knows about it.