Vaccines, it should be obvious to note — though it isn’t — are not political instruments. They are medical ones. They don’t know from politics.
I suppose vaccines did become governmental, in order to protect the public health, when they were required for entry into public school in the first generations whose lives were saved en masse by vaccines. They saved all of us from crippling polio. We took the little sugar cubes, or got those shots that sometimes left marks in our upper arms, and they saved us from a disease that just a few years before endangered everyone.
That was in the post-war 1950s. And now, in order to go to kindergarten in California, we need to have vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, hepatitis, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox.
And no one complained about vaccines, except for a few entitled wackos in Marin County, or Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his East Coast version of Marin entitlement, and who cares about them, or their entitled children.
The rest of us created the herd immunity that occurs when over 90% of people get vaccinated against deadly diseases because we know we are doing the right thing for humanity.
So, remember four years ago this month, when COVID-19 first started to spread around the world — a novel coronavirus, akin to the virus that causes the common cold, but far more deadly?
The dream was clearly for the medicos to create a vaccine that would knock it down, too.
But, we were told, dream on. It would take years to do that. Plus the long trials, so that really, we’re just going to have to tough this one out.
But then the giant capitalist medical companies disparaged as Big Pharma around the world, aided by governments such as the one headed by a certain President Donald Trump, who launched Operation Warp Speed in December 2020 — they got to work. And it turned out the medicos had been working for some time on being prepared for just such a worldwide pandemic as the one we faced. Scientists had, unbeknownst to most of us, been studying mRNA technology for decades before the COVID pandemic.
So they were in a better place than we knew to quickly develop vaccines. The trials they quickly set up allowed scientists to judge the vaccines for both safety and efficacy.
And, shockingly, in under a year, thanks to the public and private monies invested, and the geniuses who are our medicos, COVID vaccines were developed, and we started getting the shots in the arm.
Why, after he’d gotten really, really sick with the disease itself, even Donald Trump got the shot in the arm, on the QT, because, while he realized that it was a good thing for him personally, he also saw that pretending it wasn’t was a good thing for him politically, in that his base wanted to believe that COVID didn’t exist. That it was a woke invention of the politically correct. Or it was a Chinese conspiracy, or … whatever. In any case, it played to the base to not overly push this miraculous medical advance that he in fact had helped create with the Warp Speed hype, and who wouldn’t want to play to the base.
The wild thing about the shots in the arm, of which I have had so many I’ve lost count, in that I like not to die?
It turns out that they don’t really entirely prevent COVID.
They instead dramatically lower the symptoms, and the danger. I’ve had the damn disease twice. It causes sniffles for several days.
That’s it. And yet politicians get to pretend vaccines are a bad thing. What a weird world.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.