Ex-girlfriend of mine from HS is now a pediatrician. She posted this to Facebook, with attribution to the author.
Written by Benjamin Cook and posted by Jennifer Haas Mellick. Please read-health care workers are having a difficult time. #getvaccinatedtobeprotected
PSA:
1).
Vaccines work. Period. Exactly zero vaccines are 100% effective. Zero. So when a breakthrough infection occurs, it doesn’t mean the vaccine is garbage—it means that there are too many unvaccinated people spreading the disease. This already happened with measles. We don’t blame the vaccine, we blame the unvaccinated.
2).
The vaccine is safe and effective. 4,480,000,000 vaccine doses have been given without any widespread vaccine-related morbidity or mortality. Countless doctors, infectious disease specialists, peer-reviewed studies, and epidemiologists have already proven this more than once. These are people significantly smarter and better trained than any of us. Googling for 15 minutes doesn’t trump what literally all of science is telling us. You do not somehow know more than these people.
3). Masks are effective, and you’re not going to suffocate wearing one. If you refuse to wear a mask in public, you’re selfish. You care more about your self-invented freedoms than the health of your country. It’s a trivial inconvenience that has exactly zero to do with your “American right”. Like vaccines, no mask is 100%. But to say masks are 0% effective is blatantly ignorant. Since you’re not putting your body in a spacesuit, you’re not getting 100% protection, but some protection is still protection. Here are 49 peer-reviewed, published studies showing masks are effective. Yes, I’m sure you can find some tiny study that says otherwise, but the overwhelming data says they help.
http://www.kxan.com/.../do-face-mask...re-are.../amp/
4). Variants exist because of the unvaccinated. These variants often originate in areas where vaccination rates are low. Those that refused the vaccine become hosts for the virus, allowing mutant strains to form that then get passed onto other unvaccinated hosts. Those mutant strains harm our current vaccines’ efficacies thus putting even the vaccinated at risk, and we all take a step backwards because of it.
5). Covid is back solely because of the unvaccinated. We closed businesses, wore masks, and self-quarantined. We made countless sacrifices to curtail this virus. People died—4,322,022. But that wasn’t enough because of the unvaccinated. Those that got vaccinated did so bravely knowing there was a potential risk, but did it selflessly for the sake of both public health and our future. The unvaccinated cowered behind fake science, social media, and uneducated politicians until enough people were vaccinated that COVID cases plummeted. Then when those cases plummeted, our country opened back up and relaxed restrictions. That same unvaccinated population then got to ride on the coattails of the vaccinated, take off their masks, go to beaches, and enjoy an almost-normal life again. Until they caught COVID-19 for being selfish and started spreading it to all their unvaccinated friends. And now we are hurled backwards toward the beginning of this pandemic with little forward progress because the unvaccinated were irresponsible and enjoyed freedoms they didn’t contribute to. Breakthrough infections do not drive pandemics, the unvaccinated do. We had a chance to stop this, and the unvaccinated have caused us to fail.
7). If you won’t get a vaccine, go home and stay home until this is over. And when it is, know that you didn’t contribute to its end.
8 ). Be kind to your healthcare workers. Many of them are being pushed off of a mental cliff to leave medicine for good during a time when they are needed the most. We are tired. We are tired of being ridiculed and screamed at for your own faults or because “you know your body more”. We are tired of being lied to. Tired of being yelled at about wait times. Tired of seeing the same bad outcome over and over again because people won’t listen to us. We are tired of leaving work several hours late—unappreciated, hungry, physically exhausted, and mentally drained. We are not wizards; there are no magic wands. We put our personal lives on hold so you can live yours. We were “heroes”, but now we are fast food workers serving a line of customers who just walk up, demand what they want, and complain to a manager if you don’t get what our medical degrees told you you didn’t need. Be respectful, we are only human. We are all scared. We never know if that next patient with a cough is the time where we contract your COVID-19 and die a horrible death because you had to go to that concert last week.
9). Be safe, be smart, be responsible. Science is real whether you believe in it or not.