I’m older than the anti-vaxxer movement. As with the now-mainstream conspiracy theory crowd, anti-vaxxers were fringe nutballs when I was a kid. Hell, even when that TV lady started in with her autism nonsense, she represented the entitled and the bone-achingly stupid and awoke in many this weird need to blame.
The first time I realized that normal people were jumping on the anti-vax train was maybe a decade ago. I had taken my youngest to the doctor’s office and the nurse practitioner wanted permission to schedule an HPV vaccine for her.
I asked her how long it had been out, and she lost her goddamn mind. She didn’t shout so much as regard me with rage, pity, and a little bit of hatred before telling me that it had been out for a while. She was emphatic in a way she didn’t have to be and I thought it was strange.
Later I would discover that she thought I was part of the religious contingent of the anti-vaxxer nutballs, a growing movement that fundamentally (and maybe willfully) misunderstood what the vaccine did and worked tirelessly to undermine its use.
What the nurse practitioner didn’t know about me was that I had personal experience with a new drug hurting people. I’m not thalidomide-old but my ex-wife had nearly chosen to get Norplant back in the 1990s.
It was new and we were concerned, so we reached out to a friend in pharmacy school who said he didn’t trust drugs that hadn’t been out for 10 years. She took a pass on it and then women started getting really sick. One woman I worked with was miserable from the side effects and horrified at the difficulty of getting the implant removed.
Since then, I’ve used 10 years on the market as my baseline. That was before Covid struck.
It’s easy to un-remember life in the run-up to the vaccine, between the time when reports started bubbling up that Moderna could have a vaccine in early 2021 and before we all went to our televisions to have it politicized for us, there was bi-partisan concern about the speed at which this vaccine was approved and rolled out.
Honest people could have productive conversations voicing their concerns. Also, a lot of people hated the then-president almost as much as they mistrusted him. During those days there were a lot more people saying “I’m going to wait and see” than there were after the January 6 attack on the Capital.
I can’t help but wonder and worry about how the current vaccine conversation would be going if the election had gone a different way. More than a few hard-core progressive people said, “Well, they can’t make me take it,” out loud during the Trump Era.
That’s the other difficulty when our first reaction is to make sure we’re on the side of the absolute truth.
It is so very frustrating to not be able to get “back to normal.” I wrote this week that I might never go to a rock concert again. Ever. My frustration comes from my misplaced hope that, when it came right down to it, America would pull together like it does in the movies.
It really never has, and it probably never will. If it makes you feel any better, we have the same failure of leadership and responsibility we always have in times of crisis. We’re bickering while the people we’ve elected are lining their great-great-great grandchildren’s pockets.
Still and all, I don’t see how hating anti-vaxxers gets us any closer to convincing them. There will always be those afraid of being microchipped, but beyond them there are honest people who are genuinely scared and confused.
There is so much more convincing information coming out about the vaccine and lots of people who were on the fence are climbing over it.
If you think that screaming at people to “just get over it” will work, imagine yourself on the fence during a Trump Presidency, worried that maybe he did just decide to have us all injected with Clorox. Terrified by the obvious incompetence of a leader who holds you in utter contempt but who also is in charge of delivering a supposed cure that works most of the time.
Maybe we can just start asking friends if they’ve decided to get the shot yet and take their “no” to mean, “No, I haven’t decided to take it yet.” We can have conversations about our personal responses to the vaccine again if we want. Nothing is stopping us but our own refusal to desert the moral high ground.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
I wrote something on Medium this week if you’d like to take a look. I’m too nostalgic for concerts to go to them anymore. Covid has given me the perfect excuse, but my concert-going days were numbered anyway.
The story was inspired by this week’s episode of Day Drinking on Delmarva, where we revived our continuing conversation about tribute bands.
I participated in a couple of book clubs at The Greyhound in Berlin recently. It was an absolute blast. I’ve never belonged to a book club. It feels as if I’m missing out. I got to talk about my book with people who already had read it. I shared some extra stories and insights and listened to their takes on what happened. So much fun.
If you’re in a book club that read my book, I’d be happy to talk to your club. Along those lines, if you’re in a club looking for a book to read, please consider mine. If you’re just interested in more about Sherry and her crew, I still blog about it occasionally here.
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