On Vaccines – A Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Post

Back in our days of innocence before our modern-day insanity became an everyday way of life, you know way back in 2019, no one would have imagined that a title “On Vaccines” would carry with it such a visceral reaction from so many people.  Yet, here we are; this is the world we live in and these are the hands we’re given.  I am currently pondering my “vaccination status” and like my marriage status back in 2013, it's complicated.  And if I am pondering, I may as well write about it. Using the parlance of our time, my vaccination status is ‘in transition.’  More specifically, I am currently between my first and second doses of what I hope to be a largely side-effect free, maybe long term, may be temporary, additional protection against the COVID vaccine beyond my own natural immune system.

As I sit here writing between my two doses, I'm having rather mixed feelings.  What those feelings are, is largely irrelevant to the wider public. WHY I'm having mixed feelings seems to me worth discussion. Though as this is a blog post, it will not be a discussion, it will be unilaterally preached by me to you and then you may comment, unless I'm feeling rather Zuckenbergian today, then I'll simply block your comments as offensive.  So not really a discussion at all… forget that part.

I have had many vaccines before: mumps, hepatitis A and B, DTAP, and even a rather peanut buttery Gamma globulin injection in my left bum cheek – “I got shot in the buttock.”  None caused any introspection or mixed thoughts.  Yet, sitting here now I somehow feel like I am wearing a Riden’ with Biden T-shirt while adding my pronouns to my email signature block.  Odd.  With other vaccines I simply felt “Ouch. That stings a tad.” So why these feelings here? As I search for the answer, four digits continually come to mind… 2020.  I have never gotten rip-roaring drunk while hanging out with Elvis and his pet T-Rex, staying up all night eating sashimi and Red Hots while watching a Three’s Company marathon.  But if I had, I suspect that hangover and my 2020 hangover would feel about the same.

We gave up a lot last year: vacations, jobs, time with friends and family, football, and a lot of common sense. There was a lot sacrificed. For me, the biggest societal sacrifice was truth and honesty. As a lifetime news junkie, I finally had to turn it off.  Sure, I read articles here and there, mostly looking for data, but I stopped reading news for entertainment. Why? Because the inconsistencies were killing me. The world of opinion journalism, fake news, wanna-be real news, factcheckers, press conferences, an CNN, had me feeling like I had a double daily subscription to Pravda and Izvestia circa 1956. As the Soviet’s morosely observed, “There is no news in The Truth (Pravda) and no truth in The News (Izvestia).”  

There's been a lot of talk about science and scientists of late. Fine, I’ll play that game.  I consider myself to be in the science camp with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I'm also a lawyer, so I am trained to spot, and in some cases – exploit, BS.  And seeing both these aspects in this vaccine discussion is maddening. Let’s run through this a bit, why don’t we? On the one hand, the media and government are celebrating the fastest and largest vaccine rollout in history. This is truly a remarkable task.  It saved lots of lives, particularly in the 65+ crown.  Yet on the other hand, they are shoving it down our throats that it is perfectly safe and to question that is to not trust science.  I've written essays very fast; their grammar was not perfectly sound. I've built walls quickly; they were not perfectly square. I've kissed women on a first date; that didn’t go so well.  And I even once trained a whole class of engineers a little too quickly on how to use a velometer for a project to determine heat air flow rates in the decommissioning of chemical munitions.  In my haste, I omitted the instruction to add a “0” onto their speed measurements.  I caught that one in time, but trust me, that was an important “0” I overlooked.

So here we are, hoping to vaccinate billions of people with the fastest created vaccine in history.  Developed by companies with shareholders hoping to capitalize big. I love the idea of a company being rewarded for keeping me healthy. What I don’t like is being shut down when asking “Is it fully safe?” or “What are the risks of any long-term side effects?” Now the correct answer is, we believe this kind of vaccine has been historically safe. We think the risk of long-term side effects are far less than the risk of death from covid, though this greatly depends on your age and health demographic. The term “long-term side effect” has a different meaning whether you are 20 years-old or 70 years-old. Reasonable intelligent humans weighing all of the risks might reach different decisions depending on whether they are 20 or 70.  

Unfortunately, this is not the message I saw in the headlines. Instead, I was a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracist if I questioned the long-term safety of the Covid vaccines.  On the flip side, however, I was told that I shouldn't intentionally get COVID, despite being in great health, because there might be long term side effects we are unaware of. I was also told that people who recovered from COVID, might not be immune because we don't know the long-term immunity strength of the antibodies.  But we somehow know for absolute certain there are no long-term side effects of the vaccine?  “That’s illogical captain.”  It is this kind of intellectual dishonesty that made people like me skeptical of what I was being told.

Now I know why I was not being told the truth. Overall, as a society, more people would die of Covid than suffer from any of its vaccine’s side effects. If the vaccines side effects were discussed openly and the vaccine was anything but safe, people wouldn't get the vaccine… like is happening now. What they didn't realize was the other side of the stick, if you're only partially honest with people and they can tell you are keeping facts from them, they won't trust whatever you say… Including “please get vaccinated.” I have to add here, that it doesn't help that the government's approach and propaganda seemed to feel too much like a zombie apocalypse movie written by George Orwell.

Let's throw out a perfect example; when the whole pandemic started and the media is asking whether we need masks, the answer was that masks wouldn't be that effective in protecting you from Covid.  Remember that?  If you are trained to spot deception or have been through a nasty divorce, you can spot a half-truth pretty easily.  The powers that be knew that N- 95 surgical masks were helpful, but didn't want to create a run on them in the market, damaging the ability of our frontline medical workers to protect themselves. The fabrication was probably the right call, yet it was exposed as a fabrication when suddenly masks, even made out of fishnet nylons, were required everywhere we went. People realized that truth was being withheld for the greater good and they stopped trusting, questioning whether this or that was best for their INDIVIDUAL good.  And therein lies the slippery slope.  Bending the truth for a noble purpose still broadcasts to people that maybe what you say needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  

Let’s face it, 2020 was not a banner year for truth. President Trump was one of the largest serial exaggerators in history – he was the most amazing ever. Joe Biden, when he knew who he was, managed to obfuscate the truth by not being definitive with anything he said - except being in favor of fracking, except when he wasn’t.  Then of course, we saw Targets being looted and car lots being torched… to promote racial equality?  Trust was waning fast.  Next throw in an election with new mail-in ballot regulations, a surge in favor of one candidate, a counting stop in key contested states, and then a sudden surge reversal in favor of the other candidate.  After that little post-election enema, culminating with Buffalo-man taking the rostrum of the house, I have no desire to trust anyone or anything I see in the media or from my government.

With all of this in mind, it might be understandable that there are those of us who are slow to trust the vaccine propaganda… and who are more than willing to use the rest of you as Guinea pigs.  And we were kind of right.  We learn there are in fact some real side effects to some of the Covid-vaccines.  For a 70-year-old, the vaccine benefits far outweigh the long-term risks, though at 70 the drive-in at Beto’s can pose some real long-term risks.  A 20-year-old with four score years of life ahead and an incredibly low covid mortality risk might see those potential long term side effects differently.   But in trying to dumb down and simplify one overall Covid message, the truth and individualism erodes.

This brings me to where I was in trying to assess if the delta variant changed my thinking on getting the vaccine. Again, as an engineer, I went looking for data.  I did a little googling and found a CNN article that states “[m]ore than 97% of people getting hospitalized with Covid-19 now are unvaccinated….  And 99.5% of deaths are among the unvaccinated, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said Sunday.”  As a scientist, those are hugely compelling numbers, but there are three letters there that have me doubting… C-N-N.  Sorry, but they fully lost me after “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests.” Then I find a Yahoo! News article stating “[t]he UK has recorded a total of 117 deaths in people with the Delta coronavirus variant. Fifty were among people who'd taken two doses of vaccines - a reminder that the shots are imperfect.”  Hmm. That means that 42.7% of the UK deaths with the Delta variant were among the fully vaccinates, that is 42.2% different than the 0.5% number CNN is reporting.  Statistically…that’s a difference.  Ugh.  Really is there no truth out there to be found beyond James’ admonition in chapter 1 verse 5?  I wish I knew.

With all of this, I still don’t see a reason to trust what I am being told, even and especially by the well intending.  And honestly, that individualism is a fantastic characteristic of Americans.  It helps keep us out of tyranny… individualism and the 2nd Amendment that is.  So why did I personally bite the bullet and get the vaccine.  There were three reasons and they all involved me.  1) I am taking my daughter on a dream senior trip overseas and I don’t want it to fall apart as they are starting to require vaccine cards over there, 2) three of my kids have been vaccinated for their own reasons and if there are long term side effects, saying “Ha ha, I was right” is meaningless if it impacts them; and 3) I’d prefer not to be that schmuck in the hospital saying, “I should have gotten vaccinated.”  I think those chances are small, but I am proud enough to want to avoid that embarrassment more than I’m afraid of long-term side effects.   Besides, I haven’t seen my vaccinated neighbors turn into zombies yet, so I’m feeling better. See it’s all about me… which is par for most human beings.

In the end, what is my message?  Maybe it boils down to the idea that my decision was not driven by the ‘it’s completely safe’ propaganda.  We truly cannot know that now.   We will learn that over time. How about we start with recognizing that and be straight forward?  Tell the good and the bad.  Point out the pros and the cons.  Recognize the known and unknown.  Because that is reality; that is life.  I guarantee we all want to know the bad, along with the good, when we invest in a house, a car, or a spouse.  The more individualistic and risk takers among us don’t want to be manipulated; we want to be fully educated.  It is from that informed position that we want to make the right choice for ourselves and by ourselves; not trusting the untrustworthy; not feeling like we are drinking the Fauci-Flavor-Aid, but allowing people the respect to make the right (and sometime wrong) decision with full propaganda-free information.  

And perhaps after all I have written, I realize that maybe it isn’t the vaccine that I don’t trust; maybe it’s just the messaging… or the messengers.  Maybe some of us have had a little too much of our current ‘fiery but mostly accurate reporting.’