I sincerely did not think I’d be writing a third article about COVID, but here I am. Specifically because I wrote this out in a reply to a previous comment and realized, hey… this pro COVID vaccine commentary is exactly the length of a proper blog post, might as well make it official.

Specifically, a long-time reader left this copy/pasted comment:

Thank you for sharing your experience and I’m so glad you’re feeling better! I respect your perspective and have learned a lot on this blog, so I want to ask you some questions. These questions may seem a little leading and challenging to you –
1. What do you think about the vaccine now that you’ve gotten Covid DESPITE being fully vaccinated?
2. Do you really think a booster shot would have lessened your symptoms? If so, by how much?
3. Was it really worth getting vaccinated for this mild case and risking any as yet unknown or long-term side effects from the vaccine?
Sometimes we have “confirmation bias” to our past decisions which may have turned out not to be the best choice in the long run, although we don’t fully realize it at the time we made these decisions. We are only acting in our best interest with the information we have available at that time. In hindsight, there’s something called the “sunk cost fallacy” which can apply to financial choices “throwing good money after bad”, relationship choices “staying in an abusive relationship” or even health-related choices such as promoting vaccination/boosters despite evidence that they don’t work since, well, we already got the shot so it’s too late now. I’m asking you these questions because you’re a smart individual and I’m surprised you keep supporting Covid vaxes and boosters despite getting the disease yourself.

That is the entire comment, word for word, zero edits on my part.

Just for future reference, I love it when I get genuine comments on this site (spam bots can rot in the deepest pits of hell, though). I also welcome comments critiquing what I write about; try as I might, I am not an all-knowing entity, so I’d rather get the opportunity to review and see if I need to make corrections.

In this case, the three question were not challenging in the slightest to answer. I took it as an opportunity to further share my reasoning behind why, exactly, I keep consistently reiterating the importance of getting vaccinated. And beyond that, getting boosted, social distancing, wearing masks, and taking any and all other precautions to stop the spread of disease.

What’s This Got to Do With Money?

Unfortunately, this pro- vs. anti-vaccine debate is not only political in America, nor is it intertwined only with your physical and mental health. It’s also very much intertwined with your financial health too, and that’s because the American healthcare system is putrid. We remain the only developed country to NOT have free universal healthcare for our citizens. Anyone who wants to keep the benefits of the current system, like seeing a medical professional more quickly, doesn’t understand that folks in other First World countries have that too. Because private hospitals and private doctors exist, who are happy to be paid by you instead of the government in exchange for expedited appointments.

But since we are in the USA, private hospitals and doctors are the only option. That means paying whether you like it or not. Health insurance through work isn’t going to cover your all of your costs, either. Yes, this includes if you’re only getting seen for basic checkups. I remain very annoyed that I have money taken out of each paycheck for health insurance, only to STILL have a copay after my annual physical, eye exam, or dentist cleaning.

This doesn’t even approach how much you need to pay if you have a severe case of COVID. Insurance providers in this country will bend over backwards to find ways out of paying your medical bills. If you’re lucky, you only need to pay thousands of dollars for COVID-related medical care. If you’re unlucky, you’re looking at five figure medical bills. Or six figures. Hell, maybe seven! Who knows! I just know the financials might be scarier to folks than the ravages of the disease itself!

Showing symptoms for this disease, as discussed before, will definitely impact your working situation. If missing several days will hurt you, your wallet is going to hurt.

The Meat of My Pro-Vaccine Stance

I’ve kept you waiting long enough. Here’s what I wrote in response; the differences include writing in points of clarification, better grammar, and adding further relevant links.

Ask away! Not challenging at all, I thought about this stuff a lot:

Question 1

I still fully believe in the vaccine. I also fully believe the issue is I hadn’t gotten a booster before I got COVID. There’s been research saying the efficacy of the vaccines wears off after six months, which almost exactly lines up with what I experienced (having reached full immunity back in May). This also lines up with some anecdotal stories I’ve been hearing from my very well-off colleagues.*

One example is two acquaintances getting antibody tests before some trip to Portugal, having been vaxxed a little over 6 months prior; neither of them had the minimum recommended amount of antibodies in their system, which surprised them but, again, jives with the new data. Clearly, the vaccines do not provide lifelong immunity. That’s no deal breaker for me, as getting the shots earlier this year led to an immediate improvement in my day-to-day worries. If I need to keep getting shots every 6-12 months, I’m cool with that. Had to do that every year in childhood for other vaccines, anyway, so I’m relatively used to it.

Question 2

Yes, I really think a booster shot would have lessened my symptoms. Hypothetically speaking, I would guess I’d still have tested positive but would have been asymptomatic.

Question 3

YES, IT’S 100% WORTH GETTING VACCINATED. Again, this mild case means “mild for COVID”. It does NOT mean “mild in general,” like how a cold is mild or seasonal allergies are mild. Breaking a bone is less intrusive than COVID is. I got a concussion in the third grade and needed to stay in the hospital overnight; that was also less intrusive and problematic than COVID, because I could still move about and do what I needed to do the day after. Almost 2 weeks after testing positive I’m still experiencing issues with the strength in my muscles. This is much worse than any side effects I experienced from the vaccine.

I’ll further explain why I am so pro-vaccine.

20 Years of Reading Up on Infectious Diseases

(This is where my deep interest in history has come in handy. I’m pretty sure my love for history is well-documented on We Want Guac, but in case this comes as a surprise: I am a certified history nerd. This is no passing interest but a full-blown, lifelong passion I’ve been nursing since I figured out how to spell “history” in elementary school.)

I’ve read countless books from elementary school onwards, and many of those books were historical books. I’ve always liked learning about history, so a significant chunk of my library check-outs were about what happened in many a yesteryear. And because infectious diseases have wrought war-and-genocidal levels of devastation in the past, quite a few of the books I’ve read from middle school to post-college were about that very subject.

Let me tell you, they left their mark.

Reading about the first- or second-hand accounts of those who got sick with now-eradicated diseases were, to sum it up, absolutely horrifying. It’s hard to both properly convey the scope of what disease does to you while also keeping it age-appropriate; while I recall enjoying reading Fever 1793 and Code Orange pre-high school, they both left a lasting impression on what viral diseases are capable of. Other books detailed other diseases in other ways; the older I got, the more graphic they became.

I understand why these horrors aren’t often discussed: they are simply too gruesome. Attempts to explain such a grisly reality to children result in a lasting impression, too. That’s why, to this day, Ring Around the Rosies is a part of children’s playtime. This nursery rhyme is, supposedly, about the Black Death in Europe centuries prior (though this has been challenged). I don’t doubt it; kids do their best dealing with knowledge they may not be able to fully grasp yet, depending on their age. If turning an explanation into a game helps process it? Well, that lines up with what I’ve learned about psychology and coping mechanisms.

You know how all those Disney princesses have dead moms? Odds are great most of them died from an infectious disease. They were not being executed in some anti-Disney-mother campaigns, I can promise you that.

The Healthy Got Hit Hard, Too

I read about the effects of smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, the Black Death, leprosy, and cholera; I didn’t need to look up these names, they came off the top of my head from the books I’ve read prior. These weren’t dry medical texts I was reading, either. They were accounts from those who survived their sickness. Those were awful enough, but that wasn’t all of it.

There were also writings from those watching their loved ones – parents, siblings, children, spouses – succumbing to the disease.

I don’t have the right words for describing the bleak numbness of their words as they slowly came to grips with the death of their comfort person.

Reading about the horrific effects it’s caused was just as memorable as reading about the all-consuming despair people felt at seeing the person – or people, plural – most important to them wasting away… and not being able to do a damn thing about it, other than try to make them more comfortable.

There Was Never Avoiding Plague

Even if I had actively avoided reading books with disease at the forefront, I would have seen disease haunting over 90% of the historical books I was reading. This was because these diseases were part of everyday life. Even the happy-go-lucky middle schooler’s books of a kid living in the 1800s included some mention of a parent dying after getting sick from something sweeping through town. A soldier weeping over the corpse of his comrade, who finally stopped breathing after contracting the disease in the battlefield. The teenager, reminiscing about their brother or sister who wasted away in bed and whose grave they visit every Sunday.

Here are some choice quotes I took from different time periods about their effects:

The Lord sent a general visitation of Children by coughs & colds, of which my 3 children Sarah, Mary & Elisabeth Danforth died, all of them with[in] the space of a fortnight.

In this distemper had died six, seven, and sometimes eight in a day, for several weeks, there being few houses, if any, free of the sickness.

Our misfortunes in Canada are enough to melt the heart of stone. The smallpox is ten times more terrible than the British, Canadians and Indians together.

And one from Benjamin Franklin himself, if you wanted vaccine advice from a Founding Father:

In 1736 I lost one of my Sons, a fine Boy of 4 Years old, taken by the Small Pox in the common way. I long regretted that I had not given it to him by Inoculation, which I mention for the Sake of Parents, who omit that Operation on the Supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it; my Example showing that the Regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen.

(More Founding Father advice can be found via George Washington, who made it mandatory to get vaccinated for the First Continental Army in 1777. No COVID at that time; they got the inoculation against smallpox instead.)

It literally does not matter what time period I’d read about. Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the medieval period, prehistory, the Renaissance, colonization, the American Revolution, the Wild West, the World Wars. I do not exaggerate when I say ALL OF THEM were haunted by pestilence. Absolutely zero historical time periods have successfully avoided outbreaks of infectious disease even worse than COVID. There are whispers of its death and destruction everywhere in recorded history. If I came out of reading this stuff WITHOUT relief we have advanced medicine and vaccines in the 21^st century, then I was very obviously not actually digesting the material.

Remembering their stories in March 2020 made it a foregone conclusion for me to get the vaccine once it was available. Think of it as a way to honor all of the billions – literal billions – already killed by viral diseases before we could fight back.

The History of Vaccines

In my original comment, I wrote “We have had some form of vaccines since the early 18th century now, or longer than the United States has existed”. Vaccines, or their early version of inoculation, were actually around since the 16^th century in China (also known as the 1500s).

In that time, there has never been a vaccine that caused issues more terrible than the disease it protected you against. The COVID vaccine has the same basic building blocks in its ingredients as other vaccines do, only specifically made for coronavirus instead of others like polio or measles or mumps. Again, no vaccine in history, ever, has been worse for you than the disease it protected you against.

I’m going to put that in the biggest header my WordPress theme allows me to:

No vaccine in history, ever, has been worse for you than the disease it protected you against.

To make it very, very simple, read accounts from people who have experienced symptoms of this disease. Take note of the ranges, from mild, to moderate, to severe, to death. Also take note of how many people experience symptoms and, of those, how many end up dying. Then, compare those accounts and numbers the amount of people with issues after getting the vaccine.

Is the percentage of vaccine issues higher than COVID issues?

Are the vaccine side effects comparable to COVID side effects?

I even looked at several anti-vax news sources to find more data; this involved reading past the headline, reading the entire article, and finding further information about the story to double-check nothing was skewed or otherwise misrepresented. What I read failed to convince me the vaccine is more dangerous than COVID itself. That is because COVID is more dangerous than the vaccine, full stop, especially when it comes to long-term side effects.

I have several decades’ worth of reading up on history to fall back on and confirm this is not confirmation bias or sunk cost fallacy (neither of which apply to this situation anyway, but that’s beside the point). Anyone telling you the vaccines aren’t safe, or that there’s some huge hole in the logic of those that are pro-vaccine, is ignoring crucial data. We have information from, literally, all over the world about this disease.

Disease in Warfare

If you’re afraid this was a bio-weapon, I’m sorry to inform you diseases have been used as weapons throughout history; this includes rumors of hurling infected dead bodies over the walls of medieval cities so plague could breach what armies could not. This was never a recommended strategy since diseases can’t be sequestered to one particular nationality or political group; in fact, a majority of casualties in several wars were due to infectious disease, not Valhalla-worthy escapades. Here’s two examples, one from the 19^th century American Civil War and one from the first century Roman Empire:

The American Civil War was the last large-scale military conflict fought before the germ theory of disease was developed… Two-thirds of soldiers who died in that war, 660,000 in all, were killed by uncontrolled infectious diseases. Of these, in the Union Army over 67,000 had measles and more than 4,000 died.

Michael B. A Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, & History, 146-47 (2009)

The plague in the Roman provinces in 168 affected military recruitment; emergency drafting had to be conducted because of the high mortality rates amongst soldiers as a consequence of the epidemic […] In 165/6-168 CE then, this could have caused approximately three and a half to five million deaths across the population of the Roman Empire.

Christian Laes (editor), Disability in Antiquity (2017)

You might be amongst those afraid the disease is being used as an excuse to inject you with something other than a vaccine.

I truly do not see that happening here.

Earlier this year, the injections wouldn’t have worked to prevent COVID deaths if they were anything else, first of all. Second, it is in the interest of government to have a healthy population, as a sick population means, historically, you’re ripe for plunder. The vaccine’s priority is, thus, to protect everything valuable against COVID. Lastly, the level of coordination to hide something of that magnitude from an international audience is simply impossible. The three vaccines being administered in the United States were also administered – and studied – in other countries. If any of them found reason to not trust the vaccine, they wouldn’t continue importing more doses to give their citizens.

Yep, Still Very Pro-Vaccine

The only effective weapon we have to counter COVID, once it enters our bodies, is the vaccine. Antibody infusions or other doctor-approved treatments can TREAT the disease, but it can’t reverse the damage already done. Once COVID reaches your lungs, buckle up for pneumonia, another disease I’ve read about ages ago. Pneumonia, all on its own, has caused lifelong complications for those that survived it. Combined with COVID makes it all the more devastating. Besides pneumonia, COVID can also cause sepsis. Do you know what sepsis does? It eats away at your flesh; when a mother passed away from sepsis, “her left groin, lower left torso and thigh were eaten away”.

The vaccine is the safer choice over risking COVID complications like those.

All of this is why I continue supporting the vaccines and boosters. They are no less effective if they do not last for a lifetime. Tetanus shots don’t last for a lifetime, either, but there is nowhere near the amount of pushback about getting those. From what I currently understand at the end of 2021, the current COVID vaccines are effective for roughly 6 months, necessitating a booster at the 6 month mark. That is what we currently know. That is what I take for fact, built upon decades of reading about viral diseases and 21 months of reading about the horrors of COVID. I will leave links to Google searches on books about these diseases if you’d like to read up. Look out for books published before 2019; that way it’s guaranteed they’re not being influenced by our current pandemic:

Yellow fever
Malaria
Bubonic plague
Smallpox
Typhoid
Cholera
Leprosy

To reiterate…

This must be the longest article I’ve written to date. Normally I’d split this into two parts, but I don’t want to risk doing that here. With all of the misinformation, confusion, and ignorance still out there, I’m going to keep it all conveniently together.

Please, comment below or send me an email with whatever issues you find in my writeup here. It may take me a few days to respond (since I still have to catch up on life after COVID, along with the holiday season) but respond I will. In America alone, over 800,000 people have now died of COVID, the bigger number of those dying in 2021 instead of 2020. Roughly 167,000 children have lost parents or caregivers to COVID. We going to go into 2022 without any vaccine available for children 5 years old or younger… when we still don’t have data for what, exactly, lifelong COVID complications look like.

Instead, we have the historical records of what other infectious diseases have done. Those records are very, very clear: vaccines are an absolute godsend in the face of such horror. No amount of money will save you if your immune system cannot fight it off. No amount of prayers can save everyone. It is up to you to share in the responsibility of keeping yourself and others safer. Just as the armed forces put their lives on the line for your freedom, you must preserve that freedom by staying as healthy as possible.

Which means getting fully vaxxed against COVID.

Do it for yourself, your family, your community, your country.

Get the shot.

History will thank you for it.

*Why do I mention they’re very well-off? Because they have access to stuff and to powerful people I have never reached before. If I want to talk about literally any vacation destination on the planet, they will either know someone who’s been there or have visited themselves. In the past, I’ve had to consciously stop from staring open-mouthed as coworkers casually chatted about their relationship with the parents of an Olympian with a household name, or saying hi to a well-known movie star because they’re guests at the same wedding, or a cousin of theirs is proud of their client who just won a Grammy.

Guys, I literally grew up in a cornfield. Yet somehow, I got catapulted into the world of the celebrity-adjacent. Listening to them gives me a very personal insight into the lives of the truly rich and powerful… including what tools the truly-rich-and-powerful have at their disposal in a global pandemic. (Other tools include changing travel plans to go sail or hang out on a yacht, because that’s automatic social distancing. They hire specialty cleaners to de-COVID-ize their homes after a crew has been through to, I don’t know, install the latest high-tech hot tub in their guest bathroom. This is a truly alien world to the one I grew up in.)

Cover image credit: the National Cancer Institute via Unsplash