So, I’m halfway home. The wife and I got the first Moderna shot a few weeks ago. On the twenty-seventh day of May 2021, we shall be vaccinated. This week the Center of Disease Control and Prevention announced if you are one of the nearly half of Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19, you can shed your mask, and go about your business outside of hospitals and airports, etc. But for the most part, all the whining – I never understood this, why is wearing a mask such a burden? Man, we are lazy, weak slackers – can now cease. No more watching Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, former libertarian, current winey bitch, scream at Doctor Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical advisor to the president, while he tries to explain to him that a square has four sides. Although, it was sometimes entertaining. Nevertheless, things are moving along swimmingly.
Of course, there are concerns. Children, for instance, are not vaccinated. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency approval for use of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine in twelve to fifteen-year-olds and the CDC also (kind of quietly, if you ask me) announced kids as young as twelve can get the normal Pfizer shot. Hmmmm… That leaves really young kids. But, apparently, they are just rotten carriers of the virus, not its victims. I mean, let’s face it, toddlers and a little further along children are rotten carriers of everything. Example: I barely survived my daughter’s kindergarten years in which I endured varied and mysterious illnesses I had never experience in a half-century of living. In a world-wide pandemic, I haven’t had as much as a sniffle. Children are a far more dangerous virus than anything conceived by eating bats.
As a brief aside, I like to think that children are either freaks of nature, a biological prank or a vengeful God’s way of proving that we are generationally challenged. I live with a teenager now. And she is showing signs of what I was as a teenager, and if this comes to fruition, I may have to move out.
It is that kind of ice-cold factoid writing that proves where we are in this one. I am here to state clearly that once we get to a majority of vaccinated Americans this entire operation needs to turn into a science experiment. Everyone goes about their business. If you do not want to get vaccinated, I support your decision. But for the rest of us, we go to bars and the beach and to the ballgame and God help me, live music concerts. Please! I want Broadway back. If the un-vaccinated attend a show and catch COVID and get horribly sick or die, dems the breaks.
At some point, and maybe it will be next year, COVID-19, which is never going away and there will be annual booster shots for us all for the foreseeable and probably infinite future, the general sentiment – even among the most paranoid among us – will be that it is time to move on. But I think that time is now. We are a sort-of democracy, or at least claim to be. Over fifty percent of something is good enough for me. I know this has zero to do with science, as most experts say we need to be at seventy to eighty percent immunized to get to that critical herd immunity thing, but every revolution has its casualties.
Most of the people who are not getting vaccinated at this juncture are complete deniers and anti-vaccination types. Fine. They are rolling the dice and unfortunately roll the dice for their kids in every vaccination offered anyway. So, they can go about their business. Good luck to them. Those who are still hesitant and feel they are young, healthy, or like my family, lucky enough to not catch the virus, then more power to ya. Your call. And for those hesitating to see what happens, know that all vaccines show their aftereffects on subjects within three months of the shot. People have been getting these things since last September, and officially since December 2020, it’s not going to grow a third eye. And if you believe Bill Gates is putting a chip in your arm, you need to die. So, please do not take the vaccine and leave the gene pool.
Look, although this may read as unusually harsh – welcome to Reality Check, my name is James Campion, and I have been filling this space with vitriol now since 1997 – we have been quite patient (most of us outside of Florida and Texas) and now we have this fancy vaccination. So, let those who want to risk it, risk it, and let’s all get back to pre-pandemic life. If a new strain appears because we are not fully immunized against it, then, well, what else can you do? The time has come to find out.
I don’t want anyone to get sick or die. But I also don’t want people to stockpile guns and wander into a school and kill children or cops to shoot unarmed Black men in the back or half of congress to promote a false stolen election theory drummed up by a con man and then support domestic terrorism or people to abuse recreational or prescription drugs or eat fast food until their bloated heart explodes or blast eighties hair metal from their sadly over-sized, penis-compensating pick-up trucks or see another headline with the words My Pillow Guy in it or have to give money to Cablevision because I have no fucking broadband in the woods or scoop litter when my wife leaves for a few days or write about, talk about, ague about or even think about a quarantine.
Life’s tough. Get a helmet.
Go get vaccinated – or not. I honestly do not care anymore. For the rest of us, it’s time to roll that dice and see what we come up with. Because, if you think about it for about a minute, that’s pretty much how America even exists.
Until then, I wish everyone reading this the very best of luck, health, and well-being.
Or not. Whatever.
