Like many people, I’ve had misgivings about vaccines...and even viruses...but they’ve mostly centered on or long-term addiction to *bypassing* the heart of the immune system - the part that identifies, decodes, and crafts antibodies to infectious agents delivered straight into the body. Doing this forces an EMERGENCY response, not a broad-spectrum response (IMO one of the reasons that flu vaccines need to be updated every season, because the emergency response generated is TOO specific to handle variants). While medical research has done a lot (some of it questionable) toward varying and elaborating vaccine development and production, we’ve been stuck with sticking needles into people.
The mRNA vaccines *do* still rely on sticking needles for inoculation, but they are a completely different approach from the live/dead virus insertions, and I’ve come to the opinion that this is the first real leap forward in immunization in ~70 years. I’m not afraid of the vaccine...and I’m not afraid of the virus; I’m not afraid of dying, either: what I *am* afraid of is remaining stuck in my current situation, and being unable to move on toward the REST of my life.
Second stick is Monday, and I’m looking forward to it - to getting it DONE...and to moving on to a life I’m happy to wake up in....
@Rottedroots - just for the larger conversation, thalidomide was never any kind of vaccination or immunization; it was (is) an anti-depressant that became widely prescribed to pregnant women experiencing mood swings - and was NEVER tested for safety to fetuses in utero. The crippling birth defects it produced were a national catastrophe...those who didn’t grow up with the thalidomide kids truly have no idea how really awful it was. As a final note, I confess I have little confidence in the public-spirited benevolence of the pharmaceutical industry: the increase in deaths from diabetes - due to the now-extreme cost of insulin - tells a truer tale, IMO