Yeah, I get it, even my bishops have said that vaccination is an act of mercy.
But how many acts of mercy do we owe our brothers and sisters?
Five? A dozen? Per year? Per month?
It was inevitable that the COVID-19 vaccines should require a followup and a booster and there were variants that mutated and then we just had a neverending cycle of vaccine opportunities.
In the '60s when polio was a spectre, it just began to be civic duty to get your round of shots. You got the polio and you got the pertussis and you got x y and z. Then people were taking in their babies so they could load up on vaccines before they were even threatened and then stuff was eradicated.
But what's the endgame for that? How many is enough? Who's gonna recommend fewer vaccines? Not the manufacturers. Not the pharmacies or physicians. Are insurance companies gonna put a rate limiter on vaccines? I don't know. It's hard to tell what is truly Medically Necessary and what is just putting on a show.
>Yeah, I get it, even my bishops have said that vaccination is an act of mercy.
>
>But how many acts of mercy do we owe our brothers and sisters?
>
>Five? A dozen? Per year? Per month?
Except all it is, is a little prick in the arm. Quite literally. Nothing more than that. Unless you are lucky, at which point your arm gets sore, and you have a bit of a temperature and feel under the weather for a day or so, which is evidence that the vaccine is producing an extra-robust immune response from your body, ensuring you are getting the full benefit of the vaccine.
Would I take it monthly, if a formulation was designed for that purpose? Yeah, I would. Why? Because I’m not a sociopath. I CARE about the people in my community. I don’t want to be that Typhoid Mary that causes ANY deaths at all, much less a superspreader event that kills multiple people.
It’s _all about_ putting the community first, and my trivial inconveniences (of getting the vaccine, and its effects) second. Because those inconveniences of the vaccine are truly trivial. It’s a few minutes out of my day, and a little bit of crankiness for a day or two if the immune response was robust.
Against the loss of someone else’s life, or that someone getting hit with Long COVID that cripples them for months or years, I CALL THAT A BARGAIN.
>It was inevitable that the COVID-19 vaccines should require a followup and a booster and there were variants that mutated and then we just had a neverending cycle of vaccine opportunities.
The precedent has already been there for decades. The point being, people who are at risk (the elderly) and those who take care of at-risk people are ALREADY taking yearly shots for the flu. Why? BECAUSE IT WORKS at strongly limiting transmission. They themselves get much less likely to be hit with the current strain, and even if they do get hit, it ends up being less severe and less transmissible. These people protect themselves and those vulnerable people around them by getting the yearly flu booster shots.
>But what's the endgame for that? How many is enough?
Now that - thanks to politics and anti-vaxx paranoia - we have missed the opportunity for broadly-similar herd immunity (there was only a tiny 3-4 month window when the vaccines first came out), it will never end. COVID has gone endemic because we couldn’t vaccinate quickly enough, and completely enough. We can place that outcome squarely at the feet of the anti-vaxxers who refused to get vaccinated, and the politics that made roll-out issues and vaccine wastage such a big problem.
>Who's gonna recommend fewer vaccines? Not the manufacturers. Not the pharmacies
They have no input into the process, nor should they.
>physicians.
If these are the same people who collect and publish data on in-the-wild vaccine effectiveness, then yes. They CAN be the people who show when enough is enough. And all that information is collected and collated through orgs like America’s Center for Disease Control, who then provide that data to people like immunologist (this being his career specialty) Dr. Fauci, who can then craft public policy that aligns with whatever real-world peer-reviewed data they have on hand.
But how many acts of mercy do we owe our brothers and sisters?
Five? A dozen? Per year? Per month?
It was inevitable that the COVID-19 vaccines should require a followup and a booster and there were variants that mutated and then we just had a neverending cycle of vaccine opportunities.
In the '60s when polio was a spectre, it just began to be civic duty to get your round of shots. You got the polio and you got the pertussis and you got x y and z. Then people were taking in their babies so they could load up on vaccines before they were even threatened and then stuff was eradicated.
But what's the endgame for that? How many is enough? Who's gonna recommend fewer vaccines? Not the manufacturers. Not the pharmacies or physicians. Are insurance companies gonna put a rate limiter on vaccines? I don't know. It's hard to tell what is truly Medically Necessary and what is just putting on a show.