I saw the post you quoted but didn’t want to comment on it. I just don’t have the energy for a pissing match. You talked me into it though...sort of. I actually agree with a small part of that post but a lot of it had holes shot through it by its own contradictions before it was posted.
Vaccines CAN BE very effective. Some are much more refined and selective than others. Many are extremely efficient and some vaccines are so effective that they have eradicated diseases...diseases caused by highly contagious, extremely aggressive viruses. They have eradicated these diseases by creating individual and group immunity. I guess I don’t need a dictionary to tell me what a vaccine can or can’t do; what is or isn’t a vaccine or how they work. I know what they can do and have done.
That being said, we certainly don’t have a lot of hind sight or time tested data to draw on with the current COVID vaccines so they are still very much experimental. We know less about these than anything that most of us have ever put in our bodies, but there are dozens of COVID vaccines being researched right now. It is far from unrealistic to say that one of them might likely be highly efficient in PROVIDING IMMUNITY against some or most of the variants we hear about. It’s also very possible that some of them will flop or turn out to be less safe or effective than acceptable. Time will tell but you can’t make time go any faster than one second after the next. I’d have a lot more faith in them if I had any sense of trust whatsoever in some of those pushing for it and if we had a few more years of research behind us, but I’m still crossing my fingers that a year from now the outcome from this mass vaccination push is a positive one.
However, to take a stance against all vaccines because of COVID would be a prime example in poor judgement. If you ever have the misfortune of seeing a bad case of tetanus or measles, you will have a profound understanding of the value of a vaccine. To the folks who have had COVID and got through it or maybe didn’t even know they had it, this vaccine thing seems crazy I suppose. To those who went through hell with it, lost a loved one to it, or didn’t survive it - the urgency of an effective vaccine is (or was) very real.
My final thought is that we should definitely not be trading in a real, thorough consent process for each individual for a breakneck pace to whatever unknown we are heading towards. If I would have used the, “Don’t worry, it’s safe and we need you to do this” method on any of my research studies I’d have been thrown in jail a long time ago. It scares me that somehow that is acceptable now because I knew a lot more about those study drugs and vaccines than I do this one. It also disgusts me that we shame the shit out of each other for being reluctant to put something in our body that we can’t even inform ourselves about. What’s is missing in this whole process for me is the feeling that there is some transparency and honesty.
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