When I was twelve, I somehow contracted parapertussis, a "less severe" form of whooping cough that still left me coughing so hard I would routinely vomit. Let me tell you: as a freshman high school student, brand new to the area and totally unacquainted with anyone at my new school, entering with a highly communicable and public disease is not really The Move. There is a childhood vaccine for pertussis, of course—it's part of the routine TDap-IPV shot, administered at 6, 18 and 48 months of age—but for this little-sister version, there is no vaccine. There's not even really a treatment, although antibiotics can help a little if you start them early. It's basically just cough until you stop coughing.
I'm going to get it out in the open: I'm pro-vaccine. I'm pro-medicine, generally. I'm not naive enough to believe that my position is universal—I know that for fat people, women, people of colour, poor people, and those with hard-to-identify and harder-to-treat conditions such as chronic pain, inflammatory disorders, fatigue, and rare syndromes, the experience of going to the doctor and emerging with an effective treatment is a wishful dream. But when surgery removed my dying ovary, or when experimental treatment saved my dad from certain death from melanoma, or when organ donation allowed my friend to give a stranger a second crack at life, or any number of routine and miraculous interventions occur in and around my life, from EpiPens and c-sections to spinal surgeries and chemotherapies, it's hard not to feel grateful for the fact that smart men and women are engaged in the practice of discovering, inventing, refining, and delivering some of the most staggeringly advanced medical care I could possibly imagine.
And truly, I believe vaccines are a part of this medical ecosystem. Like, jeez, do you know what measles actually do to a body? Why the fuck would I want that? Like all medical interventions, I know that vaccines are not a 100% foolproof endeavor on any level—people can suffer immediate and long-term side effects, bad batches have been made, and they are more "plate on top of the leftovers in the fridge" than "triple-layer Saran Wrap" when it comes to breakthrough infections, but by and large, the shine outweighs the shit. They're safe, effective, and they don't fucking cause autism.
But we're now in an age when vaccines are under scrutiny again, and the quicksand is shifting, and things are bleak indeed. When I look back at this post in 2030—from the comfort of either my forest goblin-hut or my underground bunker, depending on how things are going—I'll be like, "Oh, right...Covid." Because Covid, as a general experience, has been chock-full of psycho-social mayhem, and people playing into and across type in sometimes-surprising (but often depressingly predictable) ways.
Take, for instance, the Ostriches: folks of any age with their heads in the
sand, denying the fact that the world needs to change to accommodate
this public health moment. These are the people who won't wear masks in
sandwich shops and who stand too close at the bank; in their most
terrible form, they protest at hospitals. They also include the Live-Forever Crowd, the 20-somethings who have never been really sick, and who are
convinced that the virus is for old people. As someone who was exposed
to sickness in my 20s, this gang really roasts my beans: it comes for us
all! Get the jab, Jaxon!
With the Anti-Authority folks, subsets include punks of all ages whose default stance is "you can't tell me what to do!" along with the former Noam Chomsky readers who see any alignment between government, health, and media—also known as "the story of why you should get vaccinated"—as some form of sinister collusion that they reject on principle. These people are often knee-jerk reactionaries, who might be convinced into coming around if enough of their punk/suspicious colleagues do so. They also might not! The Paranoiac is another subset of this; they're rejecting the vaccine as being part of a plot to control "the masses" as though the masses have not proven, over the last 18 months, that we're about as controllable as a bag of spilled rice. Also: they don't like being reminded that the Koch brothers don't know who any of us plebes are. Sorry! (But they really don't.)
The Amateur Statisticians have scrutinized "the numbers" and can tell you that the chances of them personally contracting the virus are very small. And even if they did, the chances of them actually dying from it are even smaller. And the chances of their kids dying from it is practically a speck, so why bother taking a day off work? And to this I say: you're not a goddamn scientist, Roseanne, and Long Covid is a thing. Even if you don't actually expire from the virus, fucking around with a disease that has some pretty heavy post-viral shit is a bad idea? And maybe passing it to your kids? Fuck off.
The women who rely heavily on their naturopaths and their crystal necklaces, and who have borderline orthorexia, are The Nice Ladies. These are the women who had a bad run with an inattentive doctor for a few years, resulting in a missed lump or an inflamed colon—extremely real reasons to be suspicious of re-engaging with mainstream medicine, as medical PTSD is a real thing—but who now eschew all forms of medical intervention in favour of the vitamin aisle at the local health food store. And frankly, these are the ladies who probably don't know many people who have dealt with Covid directly; they don't know a lot of nurses or warehouse workers or LTC facility staff.
And finally, we have Trolls, who show up in comment sections with malignant glee, spouting off about vitamin D and ivermectin and saying "it's just the flu." Always, always block and ignore. They take pleasure in pissing people off, they're almost always male, and they're just people with dirty souls.
I have varying degrees of sympathy and compassion for each of these types. Nearly everyone is trying to ensure their own safety, weighing the value of their own personal position against the outcomes of getting well and truly sick. Sometimes they have more than one objection—they're suspicious of both western medicine and the CBC! They're sometimes installed in echo chambers, shrugging off dissenting views as being "brainwashed" and feeling the horror of realizing they're alone in their stance. They're isolated, often, and while being online might feel like a balm ("others like me!"), in the real world, the friction with those who regard them as selfish, misinformed, stupid, or arrogant is exhausting. Do I have compassion? Sure. I do.
But I also know that not one of these types, either as individuals or as groups, are scientists or doctors. They're often super intelligent, but they're just not trained in this stuff. They're not equipped to make a good call. Because: most of us aren't! It's not a value judgement—I'm not a bad or dumb person because I don't know how nuclear medicine works—but it does mean that I rely on medical experts to make decisions on my behalf. So I rely on governing boards and bodies to ensure that my medical experts are well-trained and ethical operators. And I rely on governments to regulate the governing bodies. And the system is imperfect—like, yes, it is shitty that Pfizer is earning twenty-six billion dollars this year in vaccine revenue, when people who worked on actual Covid wards reused masks all day and couldn't get a vacation day for love or money. I know that there are big, obvious, glaring problems with the whole system. I don't excuse that for one minute.
But you know what doesn't fix the problem with the system? You know what doesn't make Covid go away? You know what doesn't instill a sense of community, trust, and mutual uplift with the people around you? You know what designates you as unallied with the chronically ill, the medically vulnerable, the elderly and children in your life?
Refusing the vaccine. Refusing the vaccine solves no problems. So tell me: how are all these smart, wonderful, scarred, scared, isolated, paranoid community members going to solve Covid without it? Don't just cough until you stop coughing.
