I’m registered to receive the Covid-19 vaccine and hope to get my first shot in the next few weeks. The sooner the better. At my advanced age, I can’t imagine NOT getting vaccinated against a disease that is 220 times more likely to kill me than the average 29-year-old. I find it hard to understand why so many people, even in my age group, are more frightened of the vaccine than the virus.
I am tempted to ask my anti-vax contemporaries if they regret getting the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Polio was a big deal when I was a little kid. The polio pandemic of 1949-52 targeted children from five to nine years old. It killed 3,000 of them in the U.S. and disabled another 21,000. Whenever a child got a cold parents worried that it might be polio. I remember hearing rumors about kids in the neighborhood getting polio and it was pretty scary. Many children who had mild cases of polio (including my late wife) saw a recurrance of symptoms — post-polio syndrome — in middle age.
We saw lots of newspaper photos of kids on crutches and in “iron lung” respirators. It’s probably just as well that cable TV news did not exist in those days. Our news media have given us a solid year of Covid pandemic porn, and one can only imagine the fear-mongering they would have generated about polio. We also dodged a bullet because neither Eisenhower nor Stevenson used polio as a campaign issue in 1952.
Opposition to vaccines has existed since the 18th Century. There was some opposition to the polio vaccine in the 1950s (and some government missteps) but nearly everyone embraced the vaccine when it became available in 1955. The scientists who developed it won the Nobel Prize. Polio cases dropped dramatically and the disease was virtually eliminated in the United States by 1979. Measles followed a similar trajectory: Vaccination virtually eliminated the disease in the U.S. but now it’s back thanks to the anti-vaccination movement.
I got all my shots as a kid. Any hesitation I might have had about vaccinations was dispelled when I joined the Navy. Everyone got a bunch of shots in basic training, often administered with a high-powered squirt gun that punctured the skin sans needle with a jet of vaccine (which sometimes resulted in bleeding). When we lined up for shots they had an ambulance standing by because there was always someone who fainted (often a big guy). I got more shots when I went overseas. If New Mexico ever gets an outbreak of cholera or bubonic plague I’m good.
My son got a head start on vaccinations. His first baby shots did not “take” because he already had antibodies in his system: Before he was born his mother got a round of vaccinations when the Army sent her family to Germany and another when the Navy sent us to Japan.
The Navy kept my vaccinations up to to date during my years in the reserves. A wallet card that documented my shots came in handy during my annual physical exam when enthusiastic corpsmen were eager to re-vaccinate me. In recent years I’ve added vaccinations for pneumonia and shingles, and I get a flu shot every year.
So I have no hesitation about getting the Covid vaccine. It’s encouraging to see that politicians who were disparaging the vaccine last year now are urging people to take it. I hope, for everyone’s sake, that enough Americans get vaccinated to ultimately eradicate Covid, just as we did with polio. I’m sure the media and politicians can replace it with another national crisis.
Shot in the arm
I’m registered to receive the Covid-19 vaccine and hope to get my first shot in the next few weeks. The sooner the better. At my advanced age, I can’t imagine NOT getting vaccinated against a disease that is 220 times more likely to kill me than the average 29-year-old. I find it hard to understand why so many people, even in my age group, are more frightened of the vaccine than the virus.
I am tempted to ask my anti-vax contemporaries if they regret getting the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Polio was a big deal when I was a little kid. The polio pandemic of 1949-52 targeted children from five to nine years old. It killed 3,000 of them in the U.S. and disabled another 21,000. Whenever a child got a cold parents worried that it might be polio. I remember hearing rumors about kids in the neighborhood getting polio and it was pretty scary. Many children who had mild cases of polio (including my late wife) saw a recurrance of symptoms — post-polio syndrome — in middle age.
We saw lots of newspaper photos of kids on crutches and in “iron lung” respirators. It’s probably just as well that cable TV news did not exist in those days. Our news media have given us a solid year of Covid pandemic porn, and one can only imagine the fear-mongering they would have generated about polio. We also dodged a bullet because neither Eisenhower nor Stevenson used polio as a campaign issue in 1952.
Opposition to vaccines has existed since the 18th Century. There was some opposition to the polio vaccine in the 1950s (and some government missteps) but nearly everyone embraced the vaccine when it became available in 1955. The scientists who developed it won the Nobel Prize. Polio cases dropped dramatically and the disease was virtually eliminated in the United States by 1979. Measles followed a similar trajectory: Vaccination virtually eliminated the disease in the U.S. but now it’s back thanks to the anti-vaccination movement.
I got all my shots as a kid. Any hesitation I might have had about vaccinations was dispelled when I joined the Navy. Everyone got a bunch of shots in basic training, often administered with a high-powered squirt gun that punctured the skin sans needle with a jet of vaccine (which sometimes resulted in bleeding). When we lined up for shots they had an ambulance standing by because there was always someone who fainted (often a big guy). I got more shots when I went overseas. If New Mexico ever gets an outbreak of cholera or bubonic plague I’m good.
My son got a head start on vaccinations. His first baby shots did not “take” because he already had antibodies in his system: Before he was born his mother got a round of vaccinations when the Army sent her family to Germany and another when the Navy sent us to Japan.
The Navy kept my vaccinations up to to date during my years in the reserves. A wallet card that documented my shots came in handy during my annual physical exam when enthusiastic corpsmen were eager to re-vaccinate me. In recent years I’ve added vaccinations for pneumonia and shingles, and I get a flu shot every year.
So I have no hesitation about getting the Covid vaccine. It’s encouraging to see that politicians who were disparaging the vaccine last year now are urging people to take it. I hope, for everyone’s sake, that enough Americans get vaccinated to ultimately eradicate Covid, just as we did with polio. I’m sure the media and politicians can replace it with another national crisis.
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