Sixteen Months
It’s been sixteen months since the COVID-19 pandemic became apparent. Here in the United States, today we are breathing a deep sigh of relief. If you watch our behavior, at the store, at the playground, in the movie theatres and the restaurants; the pandemic is over. While some parts of the rest of the world are still suffering, in the US, the hospitals are nearing normal levels, and we are moving ahead.
But, of course, it’s not over. Like the measles and polio, the COVID-19 virus hasn’t gone away. In fact, the virus has mutated to become even more infectious with the “Delta Variant”. While it’s easy to say that’s someone else’s problem – the virus still remains an American problem as well.
Miracles of Public Health
Why? Because the United States, after performing miracles of both vaccine development and vaccination efforts, has stalled. That’s not a political question, it’s a fact. We have the vaccines, and we now have the capacity to vaccinate everyone. You can go to your doctor, to your pharmacy, your grocery store, or your local public health agency and get protected. But we are struggling to reach even a seventy percent vaccination level.
A year ago we were talking about something called “herd immunity”. At the time, the concept was used as an excuse for not taking reasonable preventive measures like social distancing and wearing masks. The idea: let everyone get COVID, and for those who survive it, they will have some term of immunity to the disease. Then we can go on about our normal lives.
The politics of COVID and America, unnecessarily cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Now we are faced with a similar situation. We don’t need folks to risk getting sick. We just need them to go to the local store and get vaccinated. The current vaccines in the US: Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson, are effective against the Delta strain, and are amazingly safe. How safe are they? Every form of vaccination can have side effects, but the COVID vaccine side-effects are literally measured in single digits per million people. And even more than that, those side effects so far are almost always recoverable.
Put the Fire Out
We have a chance to put COVID “out”, just like we put polio and smallpox “out”. But it’s not going to happen here in the US, because there is a significant segment of the population, near thirty percent, who are “averse” to getting immunized. So instead of reaching “herd immunity”, and perhaps more importantly, putting COVID “out” so those who legitimately can’t tolerate the vaccine are out of danger, we have allowed “the shot” to become a political issue.
In Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio there are old coal mines on fire. They have been burning for decades, heating the ground, causing sink holes and smoke leaks. They cannot be put out – they are burning through ancient seams of coal that stretch under roads and towns and houses.
Instead of putting COVID “out”, we are letting it fester like those old coal mine fires. Instead of polio or smallpox, COVID is going to be the measles, breaking out and taking its toll on the unprotected, year in and year out. Only it’s not the measles, it’s so much more serious, and deadly.
You’re Doing Me
And for those of us who are vaccinated, it seems reasonable to say that those folks who are making the choice to avoid “the shot can pay the price. But there is an additional problem. Allowing the continued transmission of COVID vastly enhances the chance that the virus will mutate into something the vaccines do not prevent. So not getting vaccinated, just like not wearing a mask was six months ago, isn’t just a “you do you, I’ll do me” thing. It’s putting us all at increased risk, more of a “you do you and it will screw me” thing.
But the current politics of America has somehow devolved to the “freedom” to not get vaccinated against a deadly disease. We can, with only a couple of clicks on the Internet, find all of the justification needed to not get protected. It’s stupid, and it’s selfish. And it’s America today.
