After reading my last post, a regular reader asked me to expand a little about those who can’t be vaccinated against Covid for whatever reason, and those who are “vaccine hesitant.” Both are legitimate subjects that do need to be enlarged on, so I’m happy to do so, and I thank my regular reader for suggesting it.

OK, yes, the regular reader was Erin, but I appreciate the suggestion just the same…

I want to set up a little background before I do anything else, so bear with me a moment.

We have three Covid vaccines available to us in the US and Europe: the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and whatever it is from Johnson & Johnson (or Janus or Janeway or whatever they’re known by elsewhere). There are other Covid vaccines around the world, from China and Russia mainly, but these are the three in the US and I’m most familiar with them, not their foreign counterparts.

Vaccines have been around for a long time – the first true vaccine was apparently developed to combat smallpox back in the late 1700’s. Apparently it used the cowpox virus, which was not communicable to humans but was similar enough to smallpox that it created an immune reaction in humans that helped prevent severe illness when the patient was exposed to the smallpox virus. It was the first step in the eventual global eradication of smallpox, which had killed millions of people. Polio followed, diptheria, whooping cough…

So, as such things go, vaccines are proven to be good things. Vaccines help mitigate symptomatic illness, prevent deadly diseases from recurring, and help eliminate deadly disease altogether. They are not, however, perfect. Never have been, probably never will be. More on that coming up.

Now, I don’t have a freaking clue how they’re manufactured. I do know that chicken eggs are involved in the majority of modern vaccines (viruses can be replicated in chicken eggs, apparently). Then they tear apart (“render inert”) the virus, separate it into its component parts, and suspend some of those parts in a solution that can then be injected into a patient, which evokes an immune response (without giving the patient the disease, since no viable virus was in the solution), which then protects the patient when exposed to the disease itself, the “live” virus. Again, not perfect. There was an incident – decades ago, now – where a batch of a new flu vaccine got out that contained live viruses. Fortunately it was only one batch out of hundreds or thousands, but I’m sure it was rather embarrassing to have the preventative actually give you the disease…

We have a “new” vaccine method (“new” only because Covid is the first major vaccine developed after something like 20 years of experimentation and R&D): the mRNA vaccine. I don’t understand how, but apparently this manufacturing method identifies the receptor proteins on the virus and replicates those proteins for the vaccine. I don’t believe any actual virus parts are used for the vaccine. I don’t know how they do it, but they do.

The initial tests were absolutely amazing, showing an efficacy far exceeding that of previous vaccines; these vaccines were prompting the body to make much more effective antibodies and other disease-fighting cells. The Pfizer vaccine tests came back 93% effective, Moderna about the same, J&J slightly less. These are the the most effective vaccines mankind has ever produced.

But they aren’t perfect.

There was some noise about how these vaccines meant you couldn’t contract the disease, you were protected and didn’t have to worry about precautions or anything because you couldn’t get Covid once you’d had both shots.

That would have been perfect.

Unfortunately, it was wishful thinking on someone’s part, perhaps some willful misinterpretation on some reporter’s part, I don’t know. But 93% efficacy meant 7% vulnerability remained. With the vaccine, we could still be exposed, and we had a 93% chance of coming through that exposure with few or no symptoms at all, maybe not even know we’d encountered the virus. But we also had a 7% chance of symptomatic illness, and a lesser chance (3%, if memory serves) that those symptoms would result in hospitalization.

No vaccine is perfect. But these are still the most effective vaccines mankind has ever produced. And they are capable of eradicating Covid, the same way smallpox was. If only…

And yes, the vaccines also carry with them the risk of side effects. All vaccines do, they always have. Modern vaccines are complex and our bodies are also complex, no two exactly alike, which means that I might have a different reaction to a particular substance than you do. You might go into anaphylactic shock, I might have a little soreness at the injection site, from an identical shot. Or food. Or drink. You get my point – we’re all different.

To be blunt, with the Covid vaccines, side effects were big news and used to scare people away from them. The promise of feeling ill for a day or two is daunting – until you realize that for most people any reaction to the shots were mild, if they had any reaction at all, and no matter how miserable you may wind up feeling, you’re not really sick and it only proves you have an immune system; these reactions are a good thing! You didn’t hear that on the nightly news, now, did you…

That’s not to say all the side effects don’t have the potential for causing harm. The best example is the J&J vaccine’s blood clot issues with a small number of patients that may have caused real damage in a few. This side effect – like all of the side effects – was pretty rare, but concerning, and anyone hesitant to get the J&J vaccine because of it (raises hand) was justified in being cautious. They found the trigger for that recently, FYI.

But it all comes down to assessing risk vs. benefit, and some knowledge to make an informed choice.

There isn’t a lot of talk about the people who cannot be vaccinated, and that’s criminal. These are people who are allergic to some component of the vaccine which prevents them from getting it. Being allergic to chicken eggs prevents people from getting the flu shot each year, forcing them to use a more expensive and less effective vaccine, or go without. The same is true of the Covid vaccines, there are people who have allergic reactions to some component – again, no vaccine is perfect, one-size-fits-all.

Vaccines are one-size-fits-most.

These people are lost in the discussion of vaccine mandates and forced vaccinations, unseen, silenced… And these people get caught up in the rush to convict the unvaccinated as social pariahs. These are people we need to be very aware of, not marginalizing them or lumping them in with the other groups who are able to get vaccinated but aren’t. These are the people we need to help protect, until enough of the rest of us are vaccinated and/or naturally (survived Covid, in other words) immune, at which point they’ll be so much safer.

Unfortunately, that’s been made harder to accomplish thanks mostly to the government mishandling of the Covid crisis from the get-go, aided by a media more interested in maintaining controversy and division to increase profits than they are in informing the public. Conflicting and contradictory information is still being put out there, and it’s very difficult to know who to trust, where to find the truth. So I sympathize with the “vaccine hesitant” and their reluctance to get the shots.

It would be easy to say “just get over it” and get vaccinated, but that does nothing to ease the confusion and would be condescending and, frankly, dismissive of their perfectly valid reluctance. They have questions that need to be answered, and they’re not getting those answers from their authority figures.

To these people I say, turn off your TV, take a step back and take a deep breath. Let the information logjam in your mind dissolve, let each bit of data filter out from the rhetoric of outrage that caused the logjam in the first place. Accurate information is there; the human mind is a powerful tool, so use it to filter out the noise. Then look at the data, like how the vast majority of the current Covid hospitalizations and deaths are of non-vaccinated people. How vaccinated people, if they do get a “breakthrough” infection, usually experience only mild symptoms and almost never are hospitalized. How reactions to the vaccines – if any – are almost always brief and mild. How Covid kills; have you seen the latest studies?

Risk vs. benefit.

To say nothing of the fact that the longer Covid goes on, the longer it takes to get to “herd immunity,” the more variants will be created and the more likely serious “breakthrough” infections happen, and more people will die. There is a wider, social component to these deliberations that should not be ignored. Your choices will affect family, friends, and neighbors, and that fact should not be disregarded.

And I would be remiss in ignoring those people who hold religious beliefs that forbid them from getting this vaccine. Being a spiritual person myself, I find myself sympathizing with these folks, because I understand the nature of faith and how it is interwoven into the very foundations of our self. My own belief is that God gave us the means to combat and overcome adversity, a supreme tool at our disposal – our minds, combined with a God-given curiosity that compels us to learn how things work. God created a universe with obstacles to overcome, and disease is one of those obstacles. And we have, by the grace of God, already eliminated deadly, devastating diseases…

In other, more blunt terms: God gave us a brain and He probably expects us to use it.

It’s ultimately your choice, of course. But God helps those who help themselves…

So there you are. I hope this arms you with a little bit more unbiased information so you can make an informed choice.