I'm getting vaccinated today, but I don't want to. My company now requires it, and I can't visit my daughter studying abroad in Italy without it (unless we only meet in the Tuscan countryside.) So what choice do I have? I could quit the job and cancel the trip, or I can just get the shot and write this blog post.
I'd prefer to acquire natural immunity. For someone of my age and health condition, I think that's better for my long term health and for the health of those around me. But that choice is being made difficult. Sure, the vaccine has been proven to be reasonably safe in the short term, but the virus has also proven to be not very deadly for people like me. I've been shamed and blamed for 17 months for not caring about the immunocompromised enough, for not trusting the CDC fully, for not respecting Newsom's stay-at-home order, for not believing my mask protects fellow shoppers at the grocery store. The media relentlessly advocates for the vaccine, promoting the story of every white conservative virus-denying male who recanted on his covid deathbed (with underlying conditions noted below). I'm not smart enough to know exactly what cultural change is going on, but I know my skin has thickened.
For all this, I'm barely suffering. I still have a job. No one I know personally has died from covid, for which I'm grateful. And the vaccine will almost certainly do no harm. It also won't do me much good. My status as a possible asymptomatic spreader does not change. My chances of dying from covid don't change much. And my long term concerns aren't significant because I don't have much long term left.
But I can't say the same for my children. Their opportunities for school and work have been severely impacted. They have little upside to getting the vaccine, and no assemblage of the world's greatest scientists can assure them that there is no long term downside to this new medical technology. And they are inheriting a world that cannot easily let go of this massive fear of infection and distrust of germ-spreading neighbors.
That said, America is still the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. So I freely offer my arm and hope to bravely wait for what comes next.
