Fear Is Driving Both Sides In Vax Controversy

Screenshot shared on Twitter by Dr. Kimberly Manning https://twitter.com/gradydoctor/status/1443894539471687698 

An angry white man chastised me on Facebook for using asterisks in the word m*therf**ker claiming that Vietnamese Buddhist and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to "call things by their proper names." He had commented on my recent blog post with a meme showing an unidentified Black man saying, "When are you dumb m*therf**kers gonna realize both parties work for the same fuckin people?"

While I agree wholeheartedly with the analysis, I have two goals in mind: the first is, don't sink to name-calling (the first step in any genocide or civil war, because it dehumanizes "others"). The second is, don't get kicked off Facebook. 

Just yesterday a slew of prominent anti-vax accounts were kicked off YouTube (which is Google-owned, not Facebook-owned) and political commentators routinely have their social media accounts shut down for sharing inconvenient truths or using "violent language."

So, I may be skating on thin ice with this post examining some of the thinking on both sides of the COVID vaccine controversy. 

But, since I write when I've been reading news and opinion pieces until my head is about to explode, here goes.

Dr. Kimberly Manning is Black and, using hashtags like #blackwhysmatter, is offering a "No Judgment Zone" where people can talk about their vaccine hesistancy.

Fear is driving a lot of this hesitancy, especially as the CDC is a government agency that has given some really bad advice during this pandemic e.g. telling us last summer it was ok to take off masks in indoor public spaces if we were vaccinated. I suspect their motive for doing so was commerce not public health but, even if they were sincerely misguided, the advice was disastrous and led directly to this, the third and worst spike of COVID infections in the U.S.

And the good old U.S. government has not only lied to us many, many times, but has sponsored multiple genocidal practices like literally starving indigenous children in residential schools to see how few calories they could tolerate before succumbing. 

Also infecting Black men with a debilitating, fatal disease in the infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. The study ran, incredibly, from 1932 to fucking 1972! The subjects of this gruesome experiment were not told the facts, just that they were getting "free health care" from the federal government.

And let's not forget that the U.S. has been investing in biological weapons research for decades.

Here's a young NBA player explaining his own vaccine hesitancy:

I woke up to see videos of basketball players being more reasonable about vaccine hesitancy & loving your neighbor than the government and most other celebrities …am I still dreaming? Is this real?

pic.twitter.com/c9pq9IpjM7

— Ezra (@EzraCeleste) September 28, 2021

By now you probably think I'm anti-vax, but I assuredly am not. 

I'm fully vaccinated, everyone in my family that's the right age is fully vaccinated, and just this week I facilitated my husband getting a booster shot. One of my children got COVID last month but is fully vaccinated and had a mild case with no serious repercussions thus far.

Which is really fucking lucky, because now I'm going to address the other side of the ethical question. You know, public health, and the fact that we're all in this mess together.

When an individual speaks about why he, as an individual, isn't going to take the vaccine, I respect his opinion but I think he's wrong. Epidemics aren't about you, they're about the germ pool you're part of AND, increasingly important, about the hospitals you're sharing with others in your community.

I'm going to share one of the thousands of stories out there from grieving families who watched a loved one die, not of COVID, but of being unable to access health care in areas where hospital ICUs are full to overflowing.

Then I'm going to share one of the thousands of stories out there from doctors and nurses who care for acutely ill patients and have been doing so in an escalating emergency that has now lasted 20 months.

Here's one from Alabama dated September 13, "Family: Man turned away from dozens of COVID-filled hospitals." 

As hundreds of mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients filled Alabama intensive care units, hospital staff in north Alabama contacted 43 hospitals in three states to find a specialty cardiac ICU bed for Ray Martin DeMonia, his family wrote in his obituary.

The Cullman man was finally transferred to Meridian, Mississippi, about 170 miles (274 kilometers) away. That is where the 73-year-old antiques dealer died Sept. 1 because of the cardiac event he suffered. Now, his family is making a plea.

“In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non-COVID related emergencies,” his obituary read.

reported by Associated Press

And, here's one from Iowa reported September 6 where an emergency room doctor with decades of experience shares his exhaustion and career perspective:

[Dr.] VanGundy said that he'd recently seen non-COVID-19 patients with meningitis, stroke, heart attack, and blood clots in the lung, but couldn't transfer them to ICUs because "they're all full" with people who had COVID-19. He warned that if patients get sick then they'll have to wait as long as "days" for a bed to open up...

"In over 20 years of doing this I have never been this busy or this stressed or seen this many sick people," he said.

reported by Business Insider

There is lots more anecdotal evidence of health care provider burnout and grieving families begging people to get vaccinated.

Many health workers will have the problem solved for them because many governments are mandating vaccines for them. It's not a new idea, but it is adding a new vaccine to the list of vaccines already required in their field. And some health care workers have already quit rather than comply. They're certainly not in the majority, but they do exist.

Do mandates work? Again, not a new question as vaccines and vax hesitancy have been around for a long time. 

Short answer: no. Coercion is not the most effective way to address people fearful of a new type of vaccine.

What does work? Dr. Kimberly Manning's approach: education, persuasion, listening, and not judging.

If I get kicked off my blogging platforms for saying that, so be it.

Maybe I'll just go archive my post from a few months ago: "Divided We Fall May Be COVID's Underlying Purpose."