President Barack Obama getting his flu shot in 2009. Photo courtesy of Obama White House Archives.
When I was growing up, and this was a while back, it seemed like every few months some white-coated agents of terror would come to my school and, classroom by classroom, students were paraded into the gym for a shot or, in a much-preferred and rare case, a sugar cube soaked in vaccine, which I sort of recall being an anti-polio vaccine, but maybe not. The air around us was 80% peril back in those days, and some of us with vivid hypochondriacal imaginations could summon up cases for ourselves.
I read, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, a children’s biography of Father (now Saint) Damien of the leper colony on Molokai, Hawaii, and it wasn’t long after that I feared that I would start shedding limbs. It was either that or life in an iron lung. I also had a deep fear of tetanus, which could kill me in a variety of ways, ranging from lockjaw (pretty self-explanatory what that entailed) to my spine arcing until it snapped in half. When I was young I was always stepping on nails, and always getting tetanus shots.
I’ve been vaccinated against everything that’s vaccinatable. I got a flu shot this year and, though there are many among us who claim flu shots are shots that invariably give you the flu, I didn’t get the flu.
These barrages of vaccinations and other medications didn’t result in me “catching” autism or any disease that they were meant to ward off, and, as terrifying as those periodic shots in the gymnasium were, I’m thankful that I received them and that my parents weren’t the sort of people who would come later with their hysterical and unfounded moral or philosophical aversions to vaccines.
Those people, anti-vaxxers, are increasing rapidly in this country, and they may well stymie any attempts to eradicate COVID-19, once a vaccine is discovered and made available.
When that medical success is achieved, I’m going to rush down to the clinic or my doctor’s office and shove old ladies out of my way to get to the front of the line.
I have acquaintances—”friends,” as Facebook generously calls them—who see COVID as a giant step being made by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci as well as a host of lesser-known but equally evil New World Order minions lurking and likely cackling madly in the shadows to take over the world, and that whatever form the future COVID inoculation will take, it will be chiefly made of pathogens and other poisons meant to kill or otherwise immobilize whatever innocent lambs are naive enough to allow it to be put into their bodies.
And they’re serious about it. Here’s what one person hollered on Facebook this week:
“I would commit suicide on live TV at Lord Newsom’s mansion before I let them give me a vaccine or a chip. No hyperbole. I won’t allow my body and mind to be treated like a lab rat or circus monkey.”
Suicide. That’ll teach anyone who attempts to monkey with your health.
A demographically representative survey of U.S. adults conducted by Matthew Motta at Oklahoma State University and Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, both of whom study vaccine resistance, found that nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) of Americans may choose to refuse a COVID-19 vaccination, which may be available early next year.
There are several reasons people don’t get vaccinations; some religious, some philosophical, some just crackpot madness, and some lazy (“everyone’s been vaccinated, so I don’t need to”) and none of them based on good science. And if the numbers found in the study hold true, then collective immunity could be severely threatened and life with COVID will go on and on and on.
Measles in the U.S. were eradicated in 2000, and the disease’s recent resurgence has resulted in a nationwide outbreak, with 1,282 cases last year in 31 states. It was the greatest number of cases reported in the country since 1992, and every one of those cases can likely be laid at the feet of anti-vaxxers. And it’s immaterial to me, at least, what beliefs or feelings led parents to opt out of inoculating their children against that and any other disease.
It’s unclear what the conspiracy theorists think the government is hoping to shoot into the veins of all these mewling sheep marching off to dutifully become inoculated against what in many cases are painful and gruesome deaths—or if they even believe COVID-19 exists, because maybe it’s just something that secret NWO cabalists put on death certificates to shut down the world until they can gather up all the guns and shut down the economy.
People can be so maddeningly disappointing sometimes.
Tim Grobaty is a columnist and the Opinions Editor for the Long Beach Post. You can reach him at 562-714-2116, email [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter and Grobaty on Facebook.
Quarantine Chronicles Day 54: When the COVID vaccine comes, get out of my way!
When I was growing up, and this was a while back, it seemed like every few months some white-coated agents of terror would come to my school and, classroom by classroom, students were paraded into the gym for a shot or, in a much-preferred and rare case, a sugar cube soaked in vaccine, which I sort of recall being an anti-polio vaccine, but maybe not. The air around us was 80% peril back in those days, and some of us with vivid hypochondriacal imaginations could summon up cases for ourselves.
I read, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, a children’s biography of Father (now Saint) Damien of the leper colony on Molokai, Hawaii, and it wasn’t long after that I feared that I would start shedding limbs. It was either that or life in an iron lung. I also had a deep fear of tetanus, which could kill me in a variety of ways, ranging from lockjaw (pretty self-explanatory what that entailed) to my spine arcing until it snapped in half. When I was young I was always stepping on nails, and always getting tetanus shots.
I’ve been vaccinated against everything that’s vaccinatable. I got a flu shot this year and, though there are many among us who claim flu shots are shots that invariably give you the flu, I didn’t get the flu.
These barrages of vaccinations and other medications didn’t result in me “catching” autism or any disease that they were meant to ward off, and, as terrifying as those periodic shots in the gymnasium were, I’m thankful that I received them and that my parents weren’t the sort of people who would come later with their hysterical and unfounded moral or philosophical aversions to vaccines.
Those people, anti-vaxxers, are increasing rapidly in this country, and they may well stymie any attempts to eradicate COVID-19, once a vaccine is discovered and made available.
When that medical success is achieved, I’m going to rush down to the clinic or my doctor’s office and shove old ladies out of my way to get to the front of the line.
I have acquaintances—”friends,” as Facebook generously calls them—who see COVID as a giant step being made by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci as well as a host of lesser-known but equally evil New World Order minions lurking and likely cackling madly in the shadows to take over the world, and that whatever form the future COVID inoculation will take, it will be chiefly made of pathogens and other poisons meant to kill or otherwise immobilize whatever innocent lambs are naive enough to allow it to be put into their bodies.
And they’re serious about it. Here’s what one person hollered on Facebook this week:
“I would commit suicide on live TV at Lord Newsom’s mansion before I let them give me a vaccine or a chip. No hyperbole. I won’t allow my body and mind to be treated like a lab rat or circus monkey.”
Suicide. That’ll teach anyone who attempts to monkey with your health.
A demographically representative survey of U.S. adults conducted by Matthew Motta at Oklahoma State University and Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, both of whom study vaccine resistance, found that nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) of Americans may choose to refuse a COVID-19 vaccination, which may be available early next year.
There are several reasons people don’t get vaccinations; some religious, some philosophical, some just crackpot madness, and some lazy (“everyone’s been vaccinated, so I don’t need to”) and none of them based on good science. And if the numbers found in the study hold true, then collective immunity could be severely threatened and life with COVID will go on and on and on.
Measles in the U.S. were eradicated in 2000, and the disease’s recent resurgence has resulted in a nationwide outbreak, with 1,282 cases last year in 31 states. It was the greatest number of cases reported in the country since 1992, and every one of those cases can likely be laid at the feet of anti-vaxxers. And it’s immaterial to me, at least, what beliefs or feelings led parents to opt out of inoculating their children against that and any other disease.
It’s unclear what the conspiracy theorists think the government is hoping to shoot into the veins of all these mewling sheep marching off to dutifully become inoculated against what in many cases are painful and gruesome deaths—or if they even believe COVID-19 exists, because maybe it’s just something that secret NWO cabalists put on death certificates to shut down the world until they can gather up all the guns and shut down the economy.
People can be so maddeningly disappointing sometimes.
Tim Grobaty
Tim Grobaty is a columnist and the Opinions Editor for the Long Beach Post. You can reach him at 562-714-2116, email [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter and Grobaty on Facebook.
More by Tim Grobaty