Vaccines and loaded trucks

Questioning authority has been a well-documented life-long pursuit of mine, so I do not fault folks for arguing with the way the government has handled this pandemic, or which government may have sourced it.

But we have bodies stacking up around the globe – more than 690,000 and piling in the U.S. alone. We know how to stop that.

We can argue the other points next, not first.

Some person with authority was shown on the evening news claiming schools are not the problem. The problem, she said, is kids bringing it in from outside. The reporter missed a great opportunity to ask an important question: will it matter whether someone else’s kid brought it to school when our grandson brings it home – from school.

I was warning about governments tracking us back when stores were handing out Preferred Shopper cards, baited with discounts on overpriced products, as a means of tracking our purchases. I, and others, wrote in the late 1980s about the EZ-Pass that would decrease tolls on the turnpike in return for tracking where we got on and off the pike and where we worked and played.

Nearly all of us carry cell phones, allowing Mom, boyfriend, grocery store and police department to know where we are at all times. Do we really believe cameras mounted to record speeders and drug dealers are not also recording shoppers and friends on a street corner who stop to chat about the weather and how many beds are available at the neighborhood hospital?

And yet so many of us seem worried authorities might track us using the Covid vaccine.

Most of us do not know a family who has lost someone to the war in Afghanistan. After all, with an all-volunteer military and so-called “over the horizon” weapons (drones controlled by pilots in air-conditioned shipping containers in Kansas), most of us did not know a family with a member even fighting in Afghanistan.

Covid has killed in 19 months more of our citizens than the Afghanistan war killed in 20 years, and still most of us do not know anyone who has died from the virus.

I sat in our living room and watched my wife, (a retired RN, for the record) as she sat on Facebook and watched her BFF watching her 40-something son die of Covid. It took him about three weeks. My wife could not go to comfort her friend. The son had refused to get the vaccination that science and statistics prove would have prevented his final departure.

I have been a journalist nearly half a century, and I think I understand the polarization. Too many of our federal and state politicians have treated with serious disrespect those who put them in their lofty positions.

But using that as a reason to avoid the Covid vaccine is like sitting in a Camry arguing the right of way with a truck full of logs. You may be right, but it’s going to be hard scoring the win when you’re dead.

But what if the virus takes hold in, say, South America or Africa, and mutates into something no available vaccine can fight, in part because western pharma has shown little interest in sharing the vaccine with anyone who cannot pay.

In the United States, pharma is paid for their product with taxpayer dollars, and Covid vaccines are available to all people living here, regardless of insurance or immigration status. Nature has ways of controlling populations and weeding out the less fit specimens. We are watching evolution in action, and if we do not respond appropriately, we may as well park our Toyota in front of a speeding Peterbilt.