Vaccinate or Vacillate

Let me be clear, I am not wanting to tell you what to do with your bodies. Seriously. You need to make your own decisions but there is a lot of misinformation out there and it's confusing. Right? I think it's fairly safe to say that we all know we are living through a pandemic. I don't like to make generalisations but unless you've been living alone on a remote island or off chasing unicorns somewhere, you're aware that life has been slightly off-kilter for the last 14 months or so. I am just trying to navigate around all the conflicting arguments and counter arguments to find a truth that I can live with.

In my country we have not had it so bad as others, but, depending on which state you live in, it has been variously uncomfortable to downright annoying. Yes, we've had sick people - very sick people. Yes, we've had people die. Weddings, funerals, deathbed farewells, all cancelled or postponed. We are not immune to this thing, but we do not have neighbouring countries that we need to close off from. We closed our state borders and our airports (eventually; when the government finally realised this was not a joke) and we are doing pretty well now, thank you very much. We’ve had our fair share of naysayers, those who refuse to wear a mask because they believe it violates their personal rights. Personally, I am glad when someone wears a mask near me, but that’s just me. We’ve had those who actively protest against forced lockdown. We’ve had those who totally ignore the calls for isolation and continue to congregate. And we’ve sadly seen the results of that with some states being locked down for months as a result.

Now there appears to be a light at the end of the tunnel. A vaccine. Well, to be correct, several vaccines. To me, this is great news. I am one of those in the "chronic condition" category and I am not thrilled about this bug floating around but there is a small part of me that is concerned about what might be in these wonder remedies. One source of information tells me that it is the wonder cure. Another says "hey wait a minute, what if it causes worse problems? If I decide to be vaccinated, which one is safest? Are the side effects worth it?

So I have to take this all into account. We are in unmarked territory here. Or are we? This really isn’t our first encounter with a pandemic. There have been multitudes of plagues over the centuries for which there was no immediate cure. So how did we recover from those?

If we only go as far back as 541 CE, Constantinople which was the capital of the Byzantine Empire at the time, was besieged by what became known as the Plague of Justinian. Egypt was a newly conquered country which paid bags of grain as a tribute to the Emperor Justinian. Rats fed on the grain on the way and sneaky little, plague-carrying fleas stowed-away on the rats.

Bingo! A country with no immunity was now filled with very sick people and the disease spread quickly through much of the rest of the world, killing around half of the world’s population. There was no cure. Those who survived apparently somehow had immunity. A great argument for herd immunity.

Sadly, this little bug wasn’t really eradicated though and some 800 years later it poked its nasty little head out again, and voilà, in 1347 came the Black Death with another 200 million lives lost over four years. Again, there was no real concept of how contagion spreads but the first idea of isolation took root here with people being forcefully kept in quarantine until they could prove they were not infected.

Okay, so quarantine works. Sort of.

However, this plague still never really went away and in London there were something like 40 new occurrences in 300 years with large percentages of the population killed each time. The idea of quarantining went further this time with the sick being forcibly shut up in their houses, and later “pest houses” or quarantine hospitals.

We haven’t come much further in many ways, have we with our medi-hotels?

Effective treatments for these diseases did not come until hundreds of years later but when they did the diseases were at least controlled, if not entirely eradicated. Now when we hear of an outbreak of bubonic plague we can be pretty well assured that there are antibiotics to deal with it and it does not invoke the fear that it once did. The argument remains though, that the vaccines for our own backyard variety plague has not had the rigorous testing that we would like to see.

These were diseases of the distant past. More recently I think of the poliomyelitis vaccine that I was given as a matter of course as a child. This was obviously my parents' decision, not mine. Polio predominately attacked children and while many recovered on their own, many others were disabled for life with temporary or permanent paralysis, with some relying on an iron lung to survive and others even died. When the vaccine was made available it was a no-brainer. Polio is completely eradicated in the western world today, all because of a little vaccine that people decided to trust.

So, what are the expected side effects of the vaccines being touted as our saviours? Are they worth the risk?

• fever

• fatigue

• headaches

• body aches

• chills

• nausea

So pretty much the same as the flu vaccine, which many of us take routinely each year. Some of us do have adverse reactions to that and probably the same people will need to be cautious of the Covid vaccine but by and large the flu vax is an accepted part of life for most. The anti-vaxxers will always be among us, and we need to respect their opinion as much as we expect them to respect that of others. I’m not trying to force anyone to change their minds. I am just trying to navigate my way through what is a quite confusing landscape and trying to keep an open mind throughout the debate. I guess, in the end, it comes down to what level of risk you are prepared to accept.

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