Obligatory Rant About Anti-Vaxxers

This stuff is getting old

My mother has spent most of her life in a small southern Kentucky town. She’s been in a small nursing home in that town now for several years. It seems to be a good nursing home, owned by one of the less despicable national health care conglomerations.

The nursing home just called me today. They’ve found one person with COVID this week, isolated them, and were just calling to let families know. No, it wasn’t my mom or any of the patients.

Yet.

I forgot to ask if it was the Delta variant. Frankly, I’m tired of trying to keep up with COVID news and all its variants.

If you were to look at a map of Kentucky that highlighted areas where people refuse to be vaccinated, the southern area would be a solid red. These are not stupid people (well, okay, some of them are stupid). Many of them are fundamentalist, fiercely loyal, and wedded to their traditions.

We’ve had a great governor throughout the pandemic, keeping us informed, bringing in the experts to explain the importance of wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, and when the vaccines became available urging us to take advantage of them — all while fighting a few political opportunists who proclaimed he was overstepping his authority.

Excuse me, I believe it’s the governor’s responsibility to lead and protect their citizens from harm, be it civil unrest or the plague. And if he or she has to step on a few toes, so be it.

But no matter how good someone is at their job, there will always be the idiots and assholes who think they know better, based on a tiny wedge of knowledge they’re read somewhere or simply made up.

These people always have a reason for their opposing views: their church told them so, their fourth cousin eighth removed wrote a letter to the editor about the subject, their niece’s brother-in-law’s doctor advised caution, the vaccines haven’t been approved by the FDA, the vaccines were created too quickly to be safe, or they know “for a fact” that the pandemic was a government-engineered event to gain control of the masses.

The most maddening excuse is that getting the vaccine is a “personal choice.” Yeah, I agree that it’s a personal choice (for now), but that’s not a reason not to get the vaccine.

For those of you claiming it’s a matter of “personal choice” to refuse the vaccine, would it be too difficult for you to think of other people you might infect and end up killing?

If you refuse all the scientific evidence about the vaccine (not what your asshole smoking buddy heard) could you please stay far, far away from those of us who are trying to survive? As in, don’t leave your home and just have any deliveries left 100 yards outside your door.

This would cut down on infecting others, plus the rest of us wouldn’t have to deal with you. None of the rest of us want to see your sorry ass anyway, even when you end up in the hospital waiting for a ventilator that won’t come until it’s too late.

More of Marguerite’s stories

Some of Marguerite’s poems