The Big Picture Reason to Get Vaccinated
Protecting ourselves right now is important, but preventing the virus from mutating endlessly into the future is even more critical
I’ll spare you the rant about why vaccinations are important in the short term. Scientists around the globe have covered and confirmed this inside and out anyway— even those who are in no way affiliated with US politics (so you can drop the Deep State conspiracy theories). We all know that vaccines are a successful self-defense mechanism against COVID-19. At this point, the only excuse not to believe this is pure ignorance.
But it seems like we’ve only been having the short-term discussion. I’ve written this story to explain why vaccines are even more important for the future than they are right now.
Yes, the vaccine protects us against the original strains of COVID-19, but we’ve already found that it’s less protective (though profoundly safer than going without) against the Delta variant. What happens when new, more deadly variants emerge because we’ve failed to stop the virus in its tracks?
What’s the Hold Up?
Despite the ever-growing mountain of scholarly, peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific research in favor of vaccination, the ignorance and disregard for future implications persist among anti-vaxxers. And if you take a look at their arguments, they only ever try to address short-term concerns, totally ignoring the virus’s tendency to mutate and develop over time.
One of their most common objections to the vaccine goes something like this:
“I’m not getting the jab. I’ve been fine without it. People can take care of themselves.”
They say this as if the pandemic is an individual concern. But we live in a closed system. Actions have consequences, even if they are not immediately felt or seen. Whether anti-vaxxers like it or not, we’re all in this together. This doesn’t align with their beloved “Rugged Individualism,” but it’s the reality of planet Earth.
And in their defense of “individual freedoms,” they strongly oppose vaccine mandates, deeming them tyrannical. If this is the “logic” they rely on, I’m honestly surprised they haven’t revolted against those damn elitist firefighters for teaching children to “Stop Drop and Roll” if they catch on fire. But I digress.
They fail to recognize that not getting everyone vaccinated now 1) robs those who will be killed by stronger variants of their individual freedoms, and 2) robs everyone of their individual freedoms (at least to some extent) when we inevitably have to go into another series of lockdowns when new variants emerge.
Pair this with their other favorite talking point about how “the death rate is only 0.1% so I’m not going to live in fear” and we can plainly see that they are missing the point on all fronts. How so?
The virus won’t remain the same forever.
Like everything else in life, the virus changes. It already has changed, multiple times. Anti-vaxxers will push for natural immunity but fail to realize that not getting vaccinated gives COVID-19 the freedom to spread, infect, fester, and most importantly, mutate. So yeah, the death rate is relatively low right now. But that’s no reason to do nothing. In fact, that’s all the reason in the world to take drastic, decisive action to prevent things from getting worse. Prevention is key, and we’ll return to this later.
Even with a low death rate, our medical system is overwhelmed and around 700,000 people in the US alone have died at the time of this writing. Regardless of the population percentage, that’s still a giant number. And worst of all, it was entirely preventable. So what happens in a year or so when a dozen new variants are spreading around the globe because people valued their immediate, short-term “individual freedoms” instead of thinking about how the virus naturally mutates when left unchecked?
Natural or Unnatural, Does it Matter?
Even the argument that vaccines are unnatural is null. The fact that there are 8 billion human beings on planet Earth living in close proximity to one another, many of whom drive to supermarkets guided by GPS navigation to buy mass-produced foods, is unnatural. The way we live now is not how human beings were designed to live. Yet, here we are. So it’ll take innovative, “unnatural” scientific intervention to address something like COVID-19 that emerged and had such a devastating effect because of our already unnatural state of living.
Even if death is less likely than survival on a person-by-person basis, letting our bodies host this virus for weeks at a time while infected without a vaccine significantly increases the likelihood that it will mutate into a more powerful strain. Just like it already has. Natural immunity cannot possibly protect against brand new variants as they emerge. Natural immunity in and of itself is an after-the-fact solution. That being said, I’d hardly call it a solution at all, given the unpredictable nature of the virus.
The choice not to mask up or get vaccinated has already resulted in the explosion of Delta and may very well lead to even more deadly strains in the future. So let me stress again that the virus will not stay in its current state forever and even our current vaccines, let alone our immune systems, won’t be able to keep up with stronger new variants. That’s why we need to vax up. All of us. Like umair haque suggests in a fair criticism of Biden’s response to the pandemic, we need to vaccinate the entire globe right now if we want to prevent new variants from developing. We just can’t afford to give an already deadly virus the opportunity to evolve.
It’s no wonder that most anti-vaxxers happen to be conservative, as they fail to understand the concept of prevention altogether and would rather sweep issues under the rug. Out of sight out of mind. It’s the conservative way.
Ironically, the anti-vaxxers want to return to normal life so badly that they would rather ignore the issue than solve it, and are subsequently delaying any possibility of a return to normal more and more everyday. However, without real prevention, COVID may very well become a permanent part of life that will only get worse over time.
