Vaccines - They're Up to You

You may have noticed that every time there is potential for a wave of communicable disease, the CDC pressures everyone to take a vaccine of some sort. For example, almost every year there is a large advertising budget trying to convince you to get a flu shot. Recently, someone had poultry all over their faces because the flu shot had the wrong strains in it and was ineffective.

I am not an anti-vaccine guy. I am not necessarily a pro-vaccine guy. As with all such decisions, it is my belief that they are personal decisions that should be guided by the best available evidence.

There is significant pressure on people to conform to getting one of the Covid 19 vaccinations. The Washington State Department of Health has a program called Joints for Jabs. Marijuana is legal in that state for recreational use, so there Department of Health set up vaccination stations in marijuana stores. They will literally give you a joint when you take your vaccination there. Yes, it has gotten that crazy.

If you have not had Covid 19, and you are in a high risk bracket, you should probably think about it carefully, weighing the odds of infection as the numbers dwindle, the appearance of mutant strains, your personal risk factors, and information from your physician and your pharmacist.

If you are low risk, such as college student age and below, the vaccine may do you more harm than good. The number of people getting the vaccine in this age bracket who also get myocarditis suggests that the risk-benefit ratio favors not taking the vaccine, as you are at higher risk from the vaccine itself than you are from Covid at that age. By the way, the information in this paragraph above puts a lot of college students in a bad situation as colleges and universities try to force vaccination on people who really do not need it. The side effects may be worse than the disease and could be deadly. This needs to be decided in a court room: does a college or university have the right to force students to take a vaccination, a medication, or any other foreign substance against their will, or contrary to safety concerns raised by clinical research? This may impact thousands and thousands of students and their decisions about whether to continue their course of study, change careers, etc. Another group of people who do not, according to the best available evidence, benefit from the vaccination would be the people who have already had a Covid 19 infection. There is some debate in the AMA right now about whether those people should be pressured into taking the vaccination, and the argument for it actually includes the notion that they would be going against CDC recommendations. Remember that the CDC has given equivocal and even false information since the beginning of this pandemic. For example, they propagated fear to get us to wear masks when they knew masking had no effect on a respiratory virus. Trust in the CDC, the WHO, and Dr. Fauci have justifiably eroded among those who look at actual evidence. There is strong evidence that if you have had Covid 19, your antibody response is at least a strong as those who have had the vaccination. Check this out: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v2 Conclusions Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before. Summary Cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was examined among 52238 employees in an American healthcare system. COVID-19 did not occur in anyone over the five months of the study among 2579 individuals previously infected with COVID-19, including 1359 who did not take the vaccine.

So, look at the evidence carefully and make informed decisions about you and your family. If you are not accustomed to reading medical research, find people you trust and ask questions. Get a lot of opinions. Meanwhile, eat well, exercise, and stay healthy.