I can’t be the only one sick of this, right? For the past year and a half now, we have been in the middle of a pandemic. For a few months there, it kinda looked like things were getting back to normal. It almost looked like the world could finally go back to normal. People were getting vaccinated, mask restrictions were being lifted, and we could actually go out and talk in-person rather than through a screen. Of course it, as all good things are, was short-lived. For each person that got their vaccine, there seemed to be ten people screeching that they would never. Go figure, the virus mutated. Now we’re all forced to wear our masks once again, because even though we did our part, not enough people did theirs.
Finding out that Governor Roy Cooper was initiating a mask mandate and forcing everyone- even vaccinated folks- to mask up once again, I was infuriated. It’s been a year and a half and the pandemic still isn’t over. A year and a half of people stomping their feet, saying “We aren’t gonna wear masks,” “We aren’t gonna social distance,” and now “We aren’t gonna get vaccinated.”
The Pfizer vaccine has been FDA approved, and has been in use for months, even before the approval. Those oh-so damaging symptoms that whiners would call “worse than COVID” have almost completely faded into the background, with the only remaining symptoms being ones that you can find with nearly any other vaccine on the market, no matter what virus or disease it cures. Even then, not everyone experiences the same symptoms- in fact, a vast majority don’t have any at all. The vaccine has been proven to be effective and safe, so even if you were to say that “Well, I want to make sure the government isn’t doing anything weird or putting anything weird in it first,” that hesitancy should be gone, especially since government officials themselves have gotten the vaccine. The vaccine has been in use since December of 2020 and was made widely and publicly available this past July, so you’d think if the vaccine was going to turn people into mindless drones, that would’ve happened by now, right?
Despite the very simple fact that the vaccine has been tested and proven to be safe, people still refuse to get it. So much so that people would rather use deworming medicine rather than get the vaccine. That’s right, anti-parasite medicine to fight a virus, which is an entirely different type of beast. I won’t pretend that humans haven’t been using Ivermectin for decades, and I won’t pretend it never worked, but the main reason for people doing so was because of lower costs and smaller doses, and it usually only happened in lower-income or impoverished areas. The entire point of Ivermectin is to flush out the body of any parasites inside it, both for animals and humans, but it does nothing to combat viruses. The vaccine is free as well as widely available, and the Pfizer vaccine specifically (which is the most recently FDA approved vaccine) is only a two-shot series. There’s genuinely no logical reason for people to prefer anti-parasite medicine to the medically-sound vaccine. When I saw a real, actual, genuine scientist on the news, explaining in detail why you shouldn’t take deworming instead of the vaccine, I felt genuine rage. Has it become so normal for the general populace to know nothing about their safety or health?
I won’t pretend that the vaccine fixes everything. It isn’t as effective against variations such as the delta strain, and hospitalizations have been steadily increasing as that variation spreads. Despite that, though, there’s still the issue of the base virus, which the vaccine is effective against. Not only should we be keeping in mind that the non-varied virus is still an issue, but we also should acknowledge that the virus would not have had the chance to mutate if people actually wore their masks and got the vaccine when it became available. The mutation wouldn’t have been an issue if people actually cared to get vaccinated.
The people refusing to get the vaccine have no excuse anymore. There’s nothing else they can possibly say that has any validity, no excuse they could logically make. At this point, the denial to get the vaccine is caused by pure apathy and disregard for anyone that isn’t them. They simply don’t want to put in the effort and they don’t care who they endanger because of it.
Stop holding their hands. Stop being sympathetic. Stop saying “well, everyone has their own reasons.” If it wasn’t for the excuses made by deniers, we wouldn’t need to wear our masks, we wouldn’t be at risk of going back to online learning, we wouldn’t need to get screened and tested, and we wouldn’t still be in a global pandemic after a year and a half. They need to do better and we need to stop pretending they have reasons to not do better.