Be warned, this is a rant, but a rant full of science. To start, I am pro vaccine, and pro living my life to the best I can. I can’t believe that I’m still finding people who won’t get vaccinated against this pandemic that is COVID-19. The Delta variant (and after I first started this, now the Delta plus, the Lambda, and I’m sure there are more variants to come) is killing people. It is killing young, old, vaccinated and un-vaccinated, healthy and ones with chronic conditions. There’s been more reports of children being hospitalized with these new strains. It’s the selfishness of the un-vaccinated without medical precedent that I can’t stand. And, yes, there was a recent article in the Atlantic that discusses accessibility and availability. I understand the issue isn’t simple for every unvaccinated person.
However, I know several people who chose not to get vaccinated on a religious basis (and this was also confirmed by our Coyote in Zebra Clothing that heard it from several people in their area). They say that G*d will save them. My theory is that G*d taught humans to be smart enough to follow the damn SCIENCE! There’s even a past article about leaning on how leaning too much on faith has been harmful! As humanity has spent so much time learning how to save ourselves, why do some have to choose to help themselves live? Or at least not get sick?
We don’t question our use of seat belts anymore (the law was instituted when I was a kid, and now I feel horrible not wearing one 50 feet up the road). We don’t fight not smoking in a building. Stop signs and lights are laws of the road. These are public safety laws. Ones that have existed for quite a while and probably 99% of the people around follow these laws! Yes, there are always law-breakers, but for the laws above, it is rare here in the USA. But the choice not to get a vaccine or refusing to wear a mask is not helping public safety. In fact, you may be killing others. And these laws aren’t just to help protect your neighbor, they’re for those responders that are responsible for your care. The seatbelts so first responders didn’t have to have as many mangled bodies to scrape off the road, and the covid mandates were SUPPOSED to also be for our doctors and nurses to not be overwhelmed while put at constant risk. The lack of care for them in favor of this blatant selfishness is horrifying.
Vaccines are safe. While statements of vaccine injury are popping up in social media posts, the documented number of TRUE VACCINE INJURIES are one for ever million vaccines. One. And that come from a legal team that represents injured patients. 99.99% of the people alive in the USA have had a vaccine for Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Chicken Pox (or lived with it as I did in the 1980’s), typhoid, polio, and more. Smallpox was eradicated in nature thanks to vaccines. The COVID vaccines are new, but the disease is also new. Some are made using a newer technology – mRNA, others using existing technology. But let’s also take a moment to remember that the mRNA isn’t completely new, as this article from 2018 illustrates. The reasons we get a vaccine is not only for ourselves (protecting us from severe illness, death etc) but also to contribute to herd immunity in our world. Herd immunity saves lives. Most young children don’t have all of their shots, and depend upon others to have shots.
Herd immunity occurs when a large portion of a community (the herd) becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. As a result, the whole community becomes protected — not just those who are immune. Often, a percentage of the population must be capable of getting a disease in order for it to spread. This is called a threshold proportion. If the proportion of the population that is immune to the disease is greater than this threshold, the spread of the disease will decline. This is known as the herd immunity threshold. What percentage of a community needs to be immune in order to achieve herd immunity? It varies from disease to disease. The more contagious a disease is, the greater the proportion of the population that needs to be immune to the disease to stop its spread. For example, the measles is a highly contagious illness. It’s estimated that 94% of the population must be immune to interrupt the chain of transmission.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/herd-immunity-and-coronavirus/art-20486808
More information about just the vaccines can be found here https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html and here https://vaccines.procon.org/
As someone who has multiple health conditions, I am immune-challenged. For folks like many of us here, with mast cell issues, The Mast Cell Society has been giving constant updates for us about the safety. But I have friends who have little to no immune systems due to cancer, genetics and more. Some of these people are medically unable to get the vaccine under direct orders from their medical team. Those are the people I get my vaccines for. Yes, I get it for myself, but I also get it so that the people around me can be safer. I also choose to wear a mask around people inside a shop or anywhere I don’t know people. I do these things so that I can live a life that is full and happy – but I also do not want to be stupid. I am careful. I also don’t want to be the one who causes someone else’s death. And honestly, without the vaccine, you could be causing someone’s death or serious damage. Can you be okay with that? Truly okay with knowing that throwing your tantrum over individuality and sometimes utter nonsense science about “breathing only CO2” wearing a mask…could directly be how someone dies from contracting this disease?
I am just apoplectic at the lack of care for other people’s lives. How can you say that your religious beliefs in G*d will save you? Look at the bloody statistics!!! Look at the fact that more than half the ICU beds in the entire US are full with COVID cases. And those cases are from unvaccinated people! The CDC posts an update on data every day – I have posted it as the second link.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dam-is-breaking-on-vaccine-mandates/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view
Please think about the others around you. Important surgeries, such as ones for cancer, orthopedics, so called “elective” surgeries are being postponed all around the world. For someone with cancer, this means their treatment may be delayed months or years. And how scary is that? Because beds are not available because people are in the ICU with COVID!
I am not a religious person. I choose not to write G*d as I personally do not have a relationship with religion. I believe in something more like Buddhism where kindness is what people are to follow. I try to be kind in all things – this is the first time I truly can not be kind to people who refuse to vaccinate. I won’t interact with them, I won’t be around them, and I will still continue to mask around people I do not know.
