“Yeah, everybody’s left, we had a great time, and now I have Covid.”
This was the text update I got from a very seriously chronically ill friend of mine after I asked about how things went after a planned visit from distant friends and family. This dear friend has been struggling with a serious illness and an uncertain prognosis for more than five years. Part of their survival and healing strategy has been to enjoy the refuge of the safety of isolation in wilderness away from communicable diseases.
My friend lives in a rather remote area of the US, far away from the massive crowds of people currently incubating Covid for us all. Covid-19 is on the rise nationally along with other preventable fatal pathogens. Covid 19 and the flu have new friends in high places. The banning of vaccines will give these pathogens new life, literally.
Witness Covid’s ease in invading and subsequently using my friend’s disease-ridden body to mutate to perhaps even more deadly forms for the rest of us to catch. Unvaccinated friends and family brought Covid right into to my friend’s living room in the middle of f*cking nowhere. Their political cult, and their tin-foil-hat polemics about how vaccines make people sick, is more meaningful to them than the health-span of their own visibly and chronically sick family members.
OMFG.
For God’s sake, if you are going to visit someone who is sick this fall, get vaccinated or schedule a zoom call instead. The US Federal government is now a menace to the public health, actively encouraging and facilitating the incubation of serious deadly illnesses in the population. You can’t exempt yourself from this because you voted for Harris or because you pray real hard at your megachurch.
If you haven’t been vaccinated, you won’t know if you are incubating covid, but you will be FAR MORE LIKELY to be. It will be FAR MORE LIKELY that you will unknowingly and silently carry Covid around in your nose to populate the droplets you spray when you talk, laugh, and smooch with your friends.
Vaccinated people can still incubate disease as well, but at far lower rates and with far less virility. You aren’t the only one who is safer because you got vaccinated. I am too. So are your parents, and their friends at the home, your bud with Diabetes, and that other friend who just finished up some chemo. When you get that vaccine, we are all safer.
Are you willing to put every immunocompromised person in your life at risk of disease so you can avoid having a sore arm or feeling shitty for a couple of days after your Covid vaccine? Do you think that your politics protect you? Do you think the fact that you voted for Harris or give money to blue candidates somehow exempts you from the damage RFK Jr is doing? Really? Think about that.
This strategy of the brain-worm brain-dead man will actually save some money. Dead people don’t draw Social Security or make Medicare claims. Social Security death benefits are laughably puny. There’s a sick, deluded, logic in this, just like banning disease testing causes disease rates to drop.
There will be lower healthcare costs because of the vaccination ban. Those costs will be shifted to other industries which will see new business success. Keep in mind that ambulance companies, grave-digging, and mortuaries also contribute to the gross domestic product. The 401k’s of the living continue to do well, that will be good news for their heirs.
Do you want to be a part of that? Do you want to be someone who helps Covid and influenza find their way to my friend’s living room as they stash themselves as far the fuck away as they can get from everyone to bolster their already slim chance to heal?
No? Get your jab, for Christ’s sake. Stop being so god-dammed self-obsessed.
thanks for your messages about the importance of getting Covid and other vaccines. I wonder if your chronically ill friend asked her visitors about their vaccination status before welcoming them into her home? (I'd certainly ask, and I'm healthy.) But people who don't get vaccinated may be just selfish enough to lie about whether they got their shots.
I have 2 chronically ill friends, a married couple, who cut back their in-person social contact to virtually zero because when they gathered with extended family (and these were people who knew of their ill health), many people would come up and kiss and hug them. A pat on the shoulder would have been sufficient. One of my friends took one of her masks and wrote on it, in bold letters, "immune compromised" - hoping to deter people from breathing on her face. The selfishness of some people is astonishing.
I plan to avoid indoor gatherings this coming fall and winter because I'll assume many people aren't vaccinated. I'm introverted, so I can live with that choice.