*I have to get this off my chest. You might not like what I have to say below. (And trust me, this is only scratching the surface of what I’d really like to throw out there because I am angry. And sad. And depressed. And disheartened. And so many other not great emotions all at the same time.) Continue reading with that in mind.
The world is causing me undue stress right now. For a brief period, I felt that maybe, just maybe, things could be looking up, that people could make good choices and the pandemic could get under control and we could all get back to our “normal” lives and move on to trying to address all of the other things that humanity has been slowly destroying over the years (or things that just need to change because times change). For a while, I tried to stay on top of the news and current events because I felt like if I didn’t make an effort, I’d have no idea what the state of the world was at any given moment. When COVID case numbers started going down, restrictions really started lifting, and I was confident that our government wasn’t going to implode on itself if I looked away for a little while, I stopped paying as much attention to the news. I needed some time to just live and breathe. We probably all really need that at this point.
Unfortunately, that time is over. Every day, I feel like the news just gets worse. The West continues to burn and experience heat wave after heat wave. In other countries, flood waters are wreaking havoc in recent weeks. Mask mandates are going back into effect in LA and New Orleans and being fought in St. Louis. COVID cases in Louisiana and Florida are dramatically rising. My Alexa Show greeted me this morning with a headline that Arkansas has FOUR children (all old enough that they were eligible for the Pfizer vaccine) on ventilators.
If I’m honest, I do care about climate change. I care about the preservation of beautiful, natural places. I’d love to do better at reducing my own carbon footprint. I’d love it if everything I read about healthcare in this country wasn’t people complaining about it not working for one reason or another. I wish we could all just get along. The above are all things that I think about often and that do worry me. However, it’s COVID that bothers me the most right now and makes me most disappointed in my fellow humans.
My best doctor friend told me a couple of weeks ago that she asks all of her patients if they have been vaccinated when they are in for an appointment and if they haven’t been, would they like to be, as the vaccine is now so readily available. She said it’s unbelievable to her how many of them haven’t been vaccinated and that not one of them has a real reason for skipping it. (She didn’t happen to say how many actually get a vaccine during their visit, but it sure sounds like she’s unhappy with their answers to her questions.)
My niece is 9. She really wants to be vaccinated and is impatiently waiting for the studies in her age group to conclude. My sister will absolutely allow her to be vaccinated as soon as she can be, but she finds that she has to explain the decision to other people when it comes up. (“But what if she can’t have kids one day because of the vaccine?” My sister’s response was, “At least she’ll be alive to consider having kids of her own.”) This same sister has a salon suite and has people come in that question her decision to continue wearing her mask while working in close contact with her clients all day. (The answer is that her daughter currently can’t be vaccinated due to her age.) Some of these people, I’m embarrassed to say, are her own family.
I read a post on Facebook today from a former classmate of mine that really set off my current funk. She wrote about all of the precautions she and her husband have taken over the past almost year and a half to keep her family safe and healthy. She thought she was doing everything exactly right and really minimizing their risks. Despite that, her young son, then his big sister, and finally both she and her husband (both of whom are vaccinated) caught COVID. The family’s exposure was at a LabCorp site where she had taken her son for some blood work for allergy testing. They received a letter several days after his diagnosis that they had been in direct contact with a COVID positive employee during their appointment. A medical professional gave her entire family COVID. Thankfully, they all sound like they’re recovering well/have minor symptoms.
The data says that 99% of current deaths from COVID are preventable because it’s the unvaccinated that are dying. Yes, there are breakthrough infections, but they are rare. Most of those people have minor symptoms, like my classmate and her husband. Only about 50% of eligible people have been fully vaccinated in the US to date. The unvaccinated cry that “no one can tell me what to do”, that the vaccine was “made too quickly,” “will change their DNA,” “will make them infertile,” “has side effects,” “isn’t 100% effective,” and so on and so forth. In some cases, they claim that COVID isn’t real or that the numbers are inflated. I don’t understand these people. I don’t know where they get their information from or why they distrust science so much.
In reality, scientists have been working on creating vaccines for other coronaviruses for years before the pandemic happened. The big difference in making a breakthrough: all of the money that got thrown at the problem in 2020. People worried about the vaccine changing their DNA/making them infertile probably don’t really understand mRNA. In short, mRNA is just instructions for making a protein. Your very scary mRNA vaccine is teaching your cells to make the spike protein found on the coronavirus. Your immune system sees it, recognizes it as foreign and allows your body to form a response against it. Your body does NOT hold on to these instructions or use them for any nefarious purpose. Sorry to disappoint anyone that hoped it did. (I have no idea anyone would want that.) Yes, you may feel like crap for a day or two after you get the vaccine. How many people do you know that feel similarly after a flu shot? How does your arm feel after a tetanus booster? I bet your answers to those questions are, “A fair amount” and, “Not great.” Also, I don’t know of any vaccine that is 100% protective. That is not the goal of vaccines. The goal is to protect as many people as possible, and for those that do still get sick, they should not be as sick as they otherwise could or would be.
I’m not someone that usually pushes my beliefs onto others. I don’t enjoy confrontation or arguments. Anyone that knows me (unless you are REALLY, REALLY close to me and/or I know we have similar feelings on a topic) have probably never had an in depth conversation with me about anything truly controversial. I don’t want to talk to most people about religion or politics because I don’t want to fight with anyone, and if you’re someone I generally like, I don’t want to provide a reason for a rift (because let’s face it, I don’t like the majority of people all that much). As much as a health crises affecting the entire world should not be political, it is.
In the case of this global pandemic, I just have one thing to say at this point: kindly pull your head out of ass and go get vaccinated if you haven’t. It’s the responsible thing to do. At least it was, back in April when vaccines became available to anyone in the US over the age of 16 FOR FREE! If another variant worse than Delta turns up, we’re all potentially back to March of 2020.
To the as yet unvaccinated: your unvaccinated status is why Delta is here, why people are continuing to die, why children are needing ventilators, why we’re all currently sitting here wondering what comes next. If you’re not thinking these things and doing everything you personally can to keep yourself and anyone you supposedly love safe, you are the problem. If you think I’m not judging you at this point, then you don’t actually know me at all.
You don’t actually have to care what I think about the pandemic or your decisions or you as a person, but I hope you care enough about yourself or someone who can’t be vaccinated (or that maybe didn’t form a good enough response to their own vaccine) to go get yours. The risk to yourself is low. You’re not going to get COVID from the vaccine. You’re quite unlikely to develop a blood clot or Guillain-Barre Syndrome or myocarditis. Maybe they don’t know all of the potential side effects of the vaccine (but they probably do at this point), but they do know some of the side effects of COVID. How does chronic fatigue, memory problems, requiring a lung transplant or death sound to you? Those are all possibilities, and guess what? They happen at much higher rates than serious vaccine side effects, especially from those “too quickly developed” mRNA vaccines.
Also, the vaccine does not contain a microchip. That is the end of my venting session.
*Deep sigh*
Get your vaccine(s).
