I was hesitant about getting a Covid vaccine, until I got one

Several months ago my wife and I sat down after dinner to watch a movie. Suddenly, she couldn't breathe and her tongue was swollen. Within minutes her face was swollen and hives covered her body. We rushed to the emergency room where she was whisked away. She had an anaphylactic reaction, and had we pondered the idea of going to the ER much longer, she may have died. After copious amounts of testing by an allergy clinic, nothing conclusive was found. Doctors finally suggested that the flu vaccine she had a day earlier may have been the culprit. Despite having flu vaccines in prior years, they explained that every flu vaccine is different, full of various preservatives and ingredients to keep viral particles stable until they reach your muscle.

The prospect of either of us getting a new fangled mRNA covid vaccine seemed out of the question. If a flu vaccine, which has been around for decades could cause a nearly fatal reaction, then I was convinced these new vaccines were akin to suicide. As several cases of anaphylaxis were reported, I doubled down on the notion that the covid vaccine wasn't safe. It was rushed, untested, and likely to cause as much harm as it did good.

We made the decision that we wouldn't get vaccinated until a large portion of the population had gotten their jabs, and more data had been pulled together determining just how risky this vaccine really was. We didn’t want to end up on an infomercial a few years from now proclaiming, “Did you get a Covid vaccine in 2021-2022, we can get money for you!”

Sadly, the development of this vaccine and the history of pharmaceutical medicine makes vaccine hesitancy a natural reaction. During the initial round of polio vaccinations in the 1950s, the infamous cutter incident emerged. A batch of polio vaccines weren’t properly vetted and contained live polio virus. They were administered to children, many of whom contracted polio as a result, and thousands ended up paralyzed. In 1976, fearing a return of the Spanish Flu that caused over 650,000 American deaths, Gerald Ford took action to fast track a vaccine. The government believed a type of swine flu would soon sweep the country, leading to a repeat of the 1918 pandemic. It was a presidential election year, and the Ford administration passed a 135 billion dollar initiative to develop a vaccine against the flu variant he was confident would infect a majority of Americans. The pandemic never materialized, but the vaccine left a lasting impact and is believed to have caused Guillain-Barre syndrome in many recipients, a neurological condition that impairs motor function.

Soon, vaccine makers were begging the federal government for relief from costly lawsuits. Their argument was that even if their vaccines were incredibly safe, just one or two percent of people having side effects could cost them billions. Vaccine damages were canon fodder for savvy trial lawyers, and often public opinion would wager against the vaccine maker. Pharmaceutical companies felt they were risking their future on the development of vaccines, and without legislative protection, they claimed they wouldn’t develop them any longer. Eventually, pharmaceutical companies got their protection, and now vaccine related damages are heard by the vaccine court which is notorious for rarely paying out anything to those injured by vaccines. Just filing a vaccine court claim is tiresome, tedious and difficult. Worse, it usually goes nowhere.

The general public opinion is that when we rush vaccines, especially in the face of damaging pandemics, bad things happen. Thus, public acceptance of a Covid-19 vaccine, produced in record time under the moniker Warp Speed by an outwardly corrupt presidential administration, isn’t high. A recent poll showed that while 56% of Americans were willing to get a Covid-19 vaccine, the remaining 44% stated they “absolutely would not.” Experts suggest that at least 70-80% of Americans would have to be vaccinated in order to generate herd immunity, which would mean enough Americans were immune to Covid-19 that normal daily life could resume, and Covid would become a footnote in the pages of history. If 44% of the general public remains unvaccinated, it’s quite possible Covid will continue to ricochet through the population, and while dulled by those who are vaccinated, will still do real damage every year. Worse, it means that normal life may never resume as we once knew it, as any surge in Covid-19 cases would mean a return of restrictions to ensure ICU beds are available for those in need.

Despite endorsements from President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Dr. Anthony Faucci, celebrities and state legislators alike, a large percentage of the population is weary about the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, and many insist they aren’t getting it. Among black Americans the number willing to get vaccinated drops significantly. Again, they have a justifiable reason for distrusting any new medical treatment. Over the years both government agencies and pharmaceutical researchers have used black Americans, especially urban poor, as guinea lending to black Americans overall distrust of public health officials and pharmaceutical companies.

I fell firmly within the group that was weary of the vaccine, and even wearier about our government’s insistence that we get it. Watching employers make vaccination mandatory only cemented my beliefs, and I found the idea of vaccine passports to attend concerts and use public transportation to be further proof that something deceptive was at play. In addition, both pFizer and Moderna got additional legislative protections against litigation if the vaccines cause long-term damage in recipients. If the vaccine is so safe I thought, then why all the special treatment. Additionally, the FDA cannot be sued because they are considered a sovereign branch of the federal government, inherently immune to lawsuits.

Recently, Maryland governor Larry Hogan demanded that teachers return to classrooms by March 1st and if they didn’t, he promised the state would use the weight of their legal power to punish them. Hogan threatened Maryland teachers with loss of their teaching license, cuts to their salaries, and additional legal penalties if they didn’t return to in-person learning. Considering my wife is a school teacher, it put us in an awkward position regarding the vaccine. She was eligible for the Moderna vaccine, which appeared to be the only protection her district was offering against Covid amid a return to in-person learning. During her last stint with in-person learning earlier in the pandemic, at least four of her students were removed from the classroom due to Covid-19 infection. We felt we got lucky the first time around since neither of us became infected. We weren’t keen on testing our luck again.

So what did we know about the Covid-19 vaccine? Was it really experimental? How did mRNA vaccines work, and what were the real risks? First, vaccine researchers got an early leg-up on developing a Covid vaccine. In 2020, despite Chinese Communist Party demands that Covid’s genome not be published, Chinese doctor Zhang Yongzhen shared the virus’ genome on Twitter. This was a win for vaccine researchers who immediately began developing vaccines using the viral genome. So, it’s important to understand that research into a Covid vaccine was occurring almost immediately after the virus began spreading worldwide. Second, while mRNA treatments have never before been available to the general public, they have been researched, studied and tested for a while now.

mRNA treatments work by giving the human body instructions on how to do something. It might be instructions on how to create a protein, or how to recognize something new in the body. These treatments have been studied for all sorts of medical conditions, and function much like installing a software program onto a computer. A software program gives a computer a set of instructions, like telling it how to communicate with a printer or how to use a display adapter. Since researchers had Covid’s genome, they could use the virus’ unique attributes to “program” mRNA to prepare human bodies for it. That’s exactly what they did. Covid’s most unique attribute is the infamous spike protein, which bonds to ACE cell receptors and spreads the virus, causing the often disastrous symptoms of Covid-19. Vaccine researchers “programmed” mRNA to teach the body to manufacture just the spike protein, leading to an immune response and training the body to disable the spike protein should it appear. Without the spike protein attaching to ACE cell receptors, the Covid virus has nowhere to go. It’s rendered useless.

There was no need for live or deactivated virus, so concerns of another cutter incident were abated, and the vaccine platform could easily be retrofitted for new variants. So are the new Covid vaccines experimental? That depends on how you define experimental. Both Moderna and pFizer ran clinical trials of about 40,000 participants. Of those 40,000, about 18,000 received the vaccine and the rest received a placebo. Reports of people dying came from the placebo arm of the trial, and one placebo recipient actually died from Covid-19. Remember, the placebo isn’t the vaccine, so the person who died had zero protection against Covid and likely caught the virus the same way millions of others have. While there were allergic reactions in a small number of participants, overall the vaccine trials showed that they were safe and highly effective at preventing symptoms in recipients. Animal trials are currently being run alongside both original clinical trials and the public rollout, and while that’s unusual in comparison to previous vaccine production schedules, the urgency of the Covid pandemic demanded expedited maneuvers.

So in some regards, members of the general public are receiving something that is both new and not largely tested. Anyone would much rather take a vaccine that has been tested in millions of people and backed by a decade’s worth of clinical evidence. But, Covid is an immediate threat, it’s killing 3,000-4,000 Americans daily and infecting nearly 160,000 daily nationwide. Waiting for a perfect vaccine rollout and a perfect amount of trials and data only gives the virus time to mutate into more dangerous variants and ensures that countless more lives will be lost before this pandemic is brought under control. Since the holiday surge of Covid has ended and numbers are generally trending downward, it’s likely more aspects of “normal” life will resume in the near future. Americans are forced to pick their poison. Would you rather risk getting a virus, which occurred naturally and has caused untold devastation worldwide, or would you rather take a vaccine developed by teams of international scientists collaborating on perhaps the greatest medical achievement mankind has ever developed. The Covid vaccine may go down in history as our generation’s walk on the moon.

The biggest hesitancy comes from women planning on starting a family soon, or women who are newly pregnant. Pregnant women were omitted from clinical trials, and articles circulate the internet claiming the Covid vaccines will destroy female fertility. According to experts, there is zero evidence that mRNA Covid vaccines will have any effect on fertility, placenta development or anyone’s ability to have a happy, healthy baby. Experts however do cite the dangers of contracting Covid while trying to conceive or being pregnant. Pregnant women carry an increased risk of both contracting the virus and having serious complications. The CDC and FDA now recommend that pregnant women, along with those planning on starting a family soon get vaccinated.

As the vaccine needle broke my wife’s skin, I fully expected her to have an anaphylactic reaction. I had her epipen in my pocket and we sat in a waiting area surrounded by EMTs. We had made the decision that given her return to school, vaccination was no longer an option we could avoid. So what happened? Nothing. She got the shot, she felt fine, days went by and nothing happened. Aside from a sore arm, life went on as normal. Of course the risk isn’t over, these vaccines require two shots and recipients report that the second shot can cause fever, chills and muscle aches for 24 to 48 hours. Experts state that this is a normal immune response as the body develops long-term immunity to Covid’s spike protein. Early data from Israel and nursing care facilities around the world show the vaccine is working, preventing both serious illness and spread. When by a stroke of luck I was offered the Moderna vaccine, I jumped at the chance, both to acquire some protection against this virus and to see how the vaccine affected me. Like my wife, I was fine.

Of the hundreds of public educators vaccinated locally during the drive, none had any serious reactions and I haven’t heard of any adverse, routine altering side effects. The same public educators that just months ago relied on a cloth mask to protect them from Covid-19 will soon have a 95 percent chance of not getting sick, even if their classroom is filled with Covid positive students. That’s progress, but the medicine only works if you take it. I know that many of us are hesitant about this vaccine, I was one of those people. The internet is full of public discourse and articles that remind us of all pharmaceutical medicine’s great failures and evil deceptions. Those stories are real. However, the victories are real too. Treatments that have essentially cured HIV/AIDS and ended that nightmarish epidemic. Treatments that extend the life of Alzihmer’s patients, and give hope to those diagnosed with previously incurable cancers. Treatments that revolutionized how we treat depression, addiction, and chronic childhood illness. All stand as proof that even for profit medicine can help people, and in some cases end epidemics. Not that long ago, the fear of contracting AIDS was real. It was a death sentence. Left and right, people rushed to primary care doctors for HIV tests, fearing that their life may have been cut short due to a bad decision after a night of drinking. Today, HIV is a manageable condition and HIV patients live normal lives with average lifespans. Within the next few years it’s expected that an HIV vaccine will be available. In 10 years, HIV may be eradicated. Measles, mumps and rubella have all been mostly eradicated. Smallpox is a thing of the past. If we all make the choice to get our jabs and move forward, Covid too will become a thing of the past.