Your Right to Remain Wrong
Fucking okay then, let’s talk about COVID.
I always like to over disclose on this blog because basically I’m scared of being cancelled, so here goes: I’m a white male, in my twenties and healthy. In fact, I rarely even get colds and have been lucky enough to never have to take a sick day from work. When it comes to COVID, I’m about as low risk as is possible.
However, for the entirety of the pandemic I have been living at home with my parents: both of which are immunocompromised and are quite literally as high risk as they come. So when it came to social distancing and how I could live my life, I had to shield with them if I wanted to live with them (well, and even see them at all). To begin with it was great: I could walk the dog and do the shopping because remember March 2020 when people were literally scared to leave the house?
Yeah. I went to bed on a lot of nights worrying about what might happen if I picked up the wrong carton of milk at the shop and then brought the virus into my house, I knew the risk and it genuinely terrified me. I was as up to date with covid news as it was possible to be. I’m also a data nerd so I was checking the case and death numbers on a daily basis. It was super unhealthy.
Luckily, as I sit here in July 2021 the life is a much different place. Myself and all of my family are double vaccinated and we rest easy in the fact that we don’t have to worry that meeting another person indoors might kill a loved one. However, as a society there is still risk involved and that is because there is a set of people who refuse to take the vaccine.
Now, I should also say that I move to America in a couple of weeks (at long last) and vaccine hesitancy is obviously a much bigger thing over there and it honestly baffles me.
I’m just sick of the excuses of people being vaccine hesitant. The vaccines work, incredibly fucking well. They might just be the best product that any set of human beings has ever made in the history of our species. And yet there are hundreds of millions of people in the developed world who refuse to listen to reason and follow the science.
I don’t care if you saw something on Facebook. I don’t care if you watch Fox news and they said the vaccine was developed too quickly. I don’t care how many anecdotes you have of friends and family who said that wearing a mask gave them covid or the vaccine boosted their 5G signal. Fuck all of you.
This whole idea of misinformation/disinformation has been talked about a lot recently and I’m kind of sick of it, I think we need to start calling it what it is: people who believe misinformation are just not as intelligent as people who don’t believe it.
The act of being able to read information and look through data and certify things from multiple respectable sources is clearly only a thing that intelligent people can do. You can be a tory or a leftie, a republican or a democrat: there really is such a thing as facts and science and the truth is that this vaccine saves lives and when people don’t take it, people die needlessly as a result.
However all is not lost because I think I have a pretty good idea of what happens next. The Delta wave will spike in each and every country and rip through the people are not vaccinated (and a small number of those that are), and then when cases are declining we’ll relax restriction, rip off our masks and get back to “normal” life until the next variant *insert greek letter of choice* does the same thing once again when restriction will go back up and masks back on.
I honestly don’t think the world will live through more than 1 or 2 more of these lockdown whiplashes / variant waves, until the vaccine mandates start to come in and we actually drive up the antibodies in the population to as close as 100% as is required to prevent outbreaks.
And we’re already seeing it in places! France are going to require a vaccine to do certain things in society and even American companies are now jumping on the bandwagon. We all need to get the vaccine because if we don’t then more death and suffering will happen in this world. It’s as fucking simple as that.
You may have a right to be wrong, but how long until your right to be unvaccinated gets taken away?
30th July 2021
