We have failed each other

Vaccine refusal is causing preventable public health emergency

GCM Staff
Posted 7/15/21

Some of you didn’t listen. And now, you are back where you started.

Not us, you.

The entire planet spent a year, largely inside, avoiding spreading and catching COVID-19. For 4.04 million …

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We have failed each other

Vaccine refusal is causing preventable public health emergency

Posted

Some of you didn’t listen. And now, you are back where you started.

Not us, you.

The entire planet spent a year, largely inside, avoiding spreading and catching COVID-19. For 4.04 million people around the globe, hiding wasn’t enough. The virus killed them.

In Alabama, COVID-19 killed 11,402. In Baldwin County 318 succumbed to the disease. Those numbers continue to grow.

By April the COVID-19 vaccine was available to anyone over age 12 who was willing to take it. For free.

And it works. By golly, it works.

Scientists warned us that if we didn’t take it, if we didn’t stop the spread, the virus could mutate. You see, that’s because that is the only job a virus has: to spread. It does that by learning to be better at being a virus – replicating itself over and over until it learns to spread easier, with more viciousness, with more intensity.

And that’s just what COVID-19 has done.

The Delta variant is now spreading, rapidly. It digs into the body faster with a higher dosage of the disease. For those who took the vaccine, the antibodies their body has built with that vaccine’s help slaps the variant down pretty quickly.

Those who have taken the vaccine have fared better when the virus tried to strike again.

Those who have taken the vaccine no longer serve as a place for the virus to burrow into, replicate and find a way to become a more deadly variant. Instead, their bodies have learned to destroy COVID-19.

Those who skipped the shot are getting sick quicker.

Those who skipped the shot are more ill than others who caught the disease last year before the vaccine was available.

Experts fear that those who skipped the shot will die in shocking waves over the coming weeks.

Nurses, doctors and hospital staffs, already exhausted from a year of overflowing emergency rooms are back on their feet. They are again working around the clock desperately trying to save the lives of those who refused to trust in the medical science now fighting to save them.

Every report has been the same from every ER. The patients now relying on a ventilator to breathe for them are the ones who refused to spend five minutes getting a vaccine in the arm.

For the moment, the vaccinated are relatively safe, protected by the vaccine.

But as long as the bulk of our population refuses to take the shot, more than half of Alabama’s population has walked away, the virus will keep doing what a virus does.

It will keep mutating, learning and growing. And at some point, it may mutate into a version of itself that can destroy even those who have done their part and taken the vaccine.

There is a point at which the virus can win.

And the tragedy of it all is that almost every COVID-19 death is now preventable. You just gotta take the shot.

Take your COVID-19 vaccine. Stop the spread. Choose to save your own life. Choose to help end the pandemic.