My buddy Joe got his ‘booster’ vaccination three weeks ago, and had absolutely no side effects from it.
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. I had a little trouble understanding him, since he was wearing an Army surplus gas mask when he said it. It sounded a bit like, “Mmhghmm grhhmm bmmrghm.”
His wife Betty was also wearing a mask, and I think she said she’d also gotten the booster.
But I may have misunderstood them. They might have said, “They will give me a booster, over my dead body.”
Then Joe asked me if I’d gotten my booster yet. (I think that’s what he asked.) And I should have told him that I’ve been carefully avoiding anyone with a syringe in their hand for the past year.
But instead, I lied and told him, “Yep. Got it last week.”
You can safely lie about those kinds of things, when your friends are vaccinated. And when they’re wearing gas masks.
And I sort of had to lie, because six months ago, Joe asked me if I’d had my second shot yet, and I lied to him about that.
And I lied about the first shot, too. It’s a vicious cycle, when you start out with a lie.
Some of my friends — and I use the term, ‘friends’ loosely — have decided not to get the booster, after learning about Dr. Gruber and Dr. Krause.
From a New York Times article by reporters Noah Weiland and Sharon LaFraniere:
Dr. Marion Gruber, the director of the FDA’s vaccines office, will retire at the end of October, and her deputy, Dr. Philip Krause, will leave in November, according to an email that Dr. Peter Marks, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, sent to staff members on Tuesday morning. One reason is that Dr. Gruber and Dr. Krause were upset about the Biden administration’s recent announcement that adults should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet, the people said, and both viewed the announcement, amplified by President Biden, as pressure on the FDA to quickly authorize them…
When the Director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research & Review and her deputy director quit in the middle of a pandemic, because (apparently) they believe the booster shot decision was politically motivated and pushed through by federal agencies that improperly bypassed the FDA, it makes me feel partially justified for refusing to get the booster shot.
But only partially justified. I couldn’t get the booster shot anyway… because I never got Shot Number One, and Shot Number Two. You can’t boost what you never had in the first place.
The main point I wanted to make, however, is that Joe and Betty are the careful type — taking every precaution to protect themselves and the people around them, while I am the type of guy who would gladly go skydiving and not worry about landing on someone’s head if my parachute didn’t open. Because that hardly ever happens. Usually, I hear, your parachute does open.
And when it doesn’t, you usually land in a big hay stack, rather than on some innocent person.
Not that great of a metaphor, I will admit, when discussing COVID. But I really do think some folks see the vaccine as sort of a ‘parachute’ that will protect them from serious harm, as they fall at high speed through a global pandemic, surrounded by people without parachutes and who are not even wearing helmets.
Just to be perfectly clear, I’ve never gone skydiving, and have never wanted to. I’m strictly going on rumors, that it’s reasonably safe to do.
And the rumors I hear about the COVID vaccines suggest that they are reasonably safe as well. And usually effective. Not always effective, and not always safe, but usually.
Just like, your parachute usually opens.
But it doesn’t hurt to wear a helmet. Or a gas mask.