Time to Get Vaccinated
January 13, 2021 31 Comments
I don’t want to act like I can see into the future or had a premonition about the pandemic. I did not.
But, last January I wrote - Why Are Vaccines Important? - in an attempt convince my readers to look into their vaccination record and ensure they were up to date.
I also wanted to promote the flu vaccine that is available every year. I got this response from one of my readers, Beverly:
My husband died in Dec 2017 from the influenza. It was devastating. He contracted it on an airplane (doctor's guess as he had be away on business). If only everyone was vaccinated. I think people forget you can easily be a carrier of the deadly virus. It is no way to see your loved ones die.
When I read Beverly’s comment, I was heartbroken and grateful she shared her story.
The reason why I was writing about vaccination in January, 2020 was because of an experience that I had in September of 2019. I was thinking about my visit to an emergency room in Springfield, Massachusetts.
It is a long story and I don’t want to get into all of the nitty gritty details but I ended up on an ambulance headed for a Baystate emergency room with a ruptured appendix. Hint - avoid this painful fate! it sucked!!
I got there at around 9 AM and spent until 7 PM or so (hard for me to remember exactly) until the surgeons removed my appendix. I spent that 10 hours in a haze of fentanyl and morphine because the pain was nuts.
Why so long until they took it out? I was stable (meaning not going to die anytime soon) and I was triaged behind people who needed help more than I did. The hospital was overrun by patients - beds in the corridors, long lines in the waiting room, every space filled with sick people -and the staff told me that this never happens EXCEPT FOR FLU SEASON.
It wasn’t actually flu season so they were flummoxed about the demand.
This terrible health care experience made me want to write about vaccines! I couldn’t believe that every year our hospitals look like a war zone because of flu.
I looked it up.
From You are Unvaccinated and Got Sick. These Are Your Odds:
The 2017-18 influenza epidemic was an especially bad one, resulting in an estimated 45 million illnesses nationwide, according to the C.D.C.
An estimated 810,000 people were hospitalized and 61,000 people died, including 643 children. The majority of children who die from influenza have not received the flu vaccine.
61,000 seems like a low number right about now.
I will be getting the COVID-19 vaccine when it is my turn and I will vaccinate my children. You can bet that I will be posting a “Vaccine Selfie” right here on Snack Girl.
The only problem is that I haven’t had a hair cut for almost a year so I might be wearing a hat.
Did I wonder if the COVID-19 vaccine was safe? Sure! The speed of the vaccine development made me wonder but then I read about how they did it. They didn't skip any steps on safety - they simply conducted some stages of testing simultaneously unlike other vaccine trials where they did the stages one after the other. Here is an article from Johns Hopkins on the vaccine: Is the Covid Vaccine Safe?
A friend of mine shared (about vaccination) that she didn’t want to “put a disease in her innocent, pure child” - and I get that it vaccines are scary because they introduce you to the disease.
BUT, it is safe for almost all of us to do so! Even the people who have allergic reactions do not die from the vaccine.
This is a really great explanation of how vaccines work - How COVID-19 Vaccines Work.
Basically, a little bit of genetic material from the virus is introduced to our body and then our AMAZING immune system create antibodies to the virus. We aren’t being polluted - we are being strengthened.
Think about it this way - our entire lives we encounter viruses and bacteria and our immune system makes antibodies. This is a natural occurring process and all we are doing by injecting a vaccine is hustling our immune system along.
Our immune system can now keep us healthy when the truly nasty diseases show up. I am looking at you Polio, Rubella, Mumps, Chicken Pox….
We need between 230-300 million people in the USA to get vaccinated to stop the illness and death from COVID-19. The only way to end this horror is for all of us to step up and be vaccinated.
Thank you for listening. I will get off my soap box now and go back to reviews, recipes, and inspiration.
If this post moves you - share it on social media or send it to your friends. We need to convince as many people as possible to get the vaccine.
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