A Shot in the Arm

I turned 65 a few days ago, so I celebrated by getting a flu shot. Personally, I’m a big believer in vaccines. That is partly based on the science involved, and partly based on personal and family experience.

Back in the 50s and 60s when I was growing up, there weren’t as many vaccines available as there are now, and I ended up having a number of “childhood diseases.” One of them nearly killed me. When I was in the first grade, I had chicken pox, mumps, and measles, all within a period of a couple of months. It was while I was battling measles that my fever shot up to about 105°. I remember being in bed and “seeing” snakes crawling up and down the wall in my room. I ended up with a terrible kidney infection that put me in the hospital for a week. You can bet that when our kids were little, we made sure they had all their shots.

I also remember being in elementary school and standing in line to get a sugar cube with the polio vaccine on it, and the stories my parents told me about their classmates and cousins, pre-vaccine, who contracted polio and ended up crippled or in an iron lung. A generation before that, it was smallpox. My dad (born in 1928) carried a small round scar on his left shoulder where he received his smallpox inoculation.

Over the years, I have had numerous vaccines. I get a flu shot every year. I used to catch the flu about every other year. It would always make me sick as a big dog, and it seemed to be a month or six weeks before I was completely over it. So I don’t mess around about it anymore – I just get the shot and am done with it. It may make me feel a little “blah” for a day or two, but that’s a lot better than six weeks.

I have also been blessed to go on a couple of short-term mission trips to Central and South America. There was a long list of shots that I had to get when I was preparing to go to Peru a few years ago. I was in line with several other people for a yellow fever vaccination, and some of the folks were complaining about having to get “so many shots” for such a relatively short trip. The clinic director told us, with a seriousness that I did not mistake, that we would be given a card proving our vaccinated status, and that we needed to keep it with our passports. “Just remember,” she told us, “you don’t have to have that card to leave the country. But you will need it if you want to get back in.”

Today, thank God, we don’t have to worry about smallpox, or polio, or a whole host of other diseases, and it’s because of vaccines. Vaccines for kids do NOT cause autism. That was a rumor that was started back in the 1990s because of a published report by a British surgeon ­– except he had falsified the numbers in his study. He lost his medical license because of that lie, but the rumor persists. And the Covid vaccine does not make you sterile, it doesn’t implant microchips in your body, and it’s not the Mark of the Beast. And no, it’s not perfect, but if you get Covid, the likelihood is that you will have a relatively mild case. And the main side effect of the vaccine is, you don’t die from Covid – about 99.95% of the time.

So please, if you haven’t had yours yet, go get a Covid vaccine. Now that they have approved the booster for Moderna shots, I plan to get mine soon. And while you’re at, you can also get a flu shot – they’re saying that this flu season could be one of the worst in years.

Some people claim that requiring a vaccine somehow impinges on their “personal freedom,” but the truth is, there are all kinds of restrictions that we agree to abide by, in order to live among others as part of a community. You don’t have the “freedom” to drive your vehicle if you’re drunk. You don’t have the freedom to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

When the framers of the United States Constitution were drafting the Preamble to that historic document, part of their purpose, they said, was to “promote the general Welfare.” We need to recognize that we have responsibilities to our neighbors to behave in a way that promotes health and wellness as part of the “general Welfare” of the entire community. And surely that is also included in what Jesus meant when He told us to “love our neighbor.”