I Am NOT Fine, Thanks by Wil Anderson

Author:Wil Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

24

JABS

One of the things I like about science is that you don’t need to believe in it for it to work. In fact, it works whether you believe in it or not. Throughout history there have been plenty of people who didn’t believe in evolution, but people still evolved. It doesn’t matter how many times a day you say, ‘I don’t believe in gravity. I don’t believe in gravity. I don’t believe in gravity.’ You will still not float off.

I think vaccines are a miracle of science but I also admit there are some downsides and negative side-effects to vaccines. For example, sometimes vaccines keep people alive long enough that they believe vaccines don’t work.

The thing I find hardest to rationalise about the people who were against the Covid vaccines was that by the time you get to adulthood you have already had a lot of vaccines. You have been vaccinated against so many diseases that it sounds like a verse Billy Joel edited out of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. You’ve had: polio, tetanus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rubella, measles, whooping cough, the mumps, smallpox, diphtheria, rabies, rotavirus, pneumococcal disease, HPV and meningococcal disease.

I recently got the tetanus vaccine. I hadn’t stepped on a nail or anything; I got that one for the inevitable war against the robots. I also got the whooping cough vaccine. One of my friends had a baby, we were going to a party for the baby, and we needed to get the baby a present. So I decided to get it the present of not coughing on it and killing it. ‘I got the baby a rattle.’ Yeah, that is a pretty good present, but I got it a not-rattle in its lungs.

I understand that parents want to protect their children and not have them be in any pain, but I have heard people object to vaccines because ‘My baby got a needle and it cried!’ Yeah, okay. Your baby also saw a feather unexpectedly and cried. And then it burped and it cried. And then it cried and it cried.

Not having kids myself, I think raising a kid must be the hardest thing in the world. And it’s probably hard enough without someone who doesn’t have kids judging how you raise yours. So this is not a judgement. This is simply an external observation: your babies cry all the time. All. The. Time. And mostly you don’t know why. So why are you making such a big deal about the one day in four years that you actually know why it is crying? Yes, your baby is crying: it just got an injection that will save its life and the life of its friends. But don’t make out like this is a future therapy moment. Yesterday the baby accidentally saw its own foot, surprised itself, and cried for an hour. Kids cry. It’s okay. Some even cry when someone makes a harmless joke about a bee.

Your baby cried when it got a needle and now you don’t want it to have any more needles.

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