Elie Wiesel once wrote that there were only two races of people: the decent and the indecent. In 2021 some would revise that to read: the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
First, to address my moral authority on this issue. I got the first shot a few days ago. The decision was even more challenging for me as a leukemia patient. Nine people — nine warriors — who went through the transplant program alongside me, rejected their donor marrow within hours of receiving the vaccine. That didn’t come from Substack — that’s data I was provided while being treated in one of the top cancer centers in the world. Still, my doctors think that the rewards outweigh the risks, as best as they can tell for now, and I agreed to get vaccinated.
On Behalf of the Unvaccinated
As if we didn’t have enough fissures in our world, and particularly in American culture right now, we now have vaccine wars, or more specifically, a war being waged against the unvaccinated. As someone who had delayed getting vaccinated for good reason, I have been subjected to more hostility, smarminess, and strawman argumentation than in all my time in politics and conservatism. Never before have I had so many friends — many of them conservative Christians — come at me as I have in the last 15 days over a vaccine that is not a vaccine in any historical meaning of that word. (It is gene therapy.) Never before have I witnessed such open hostility aimed at thoughtful people over a vaccine that no human on earth — not doctor nor researcher nor politician nor layperson — knows either the long-term impact or the true efficacy thereof. These “jabs,” as they are flippantly called, are the medical equivalent of me taking chemotherapy before I had cancer because perhaps it would have some prophylactic tendencies — maybe — depending on the variant.
Let’s take one straw man apart. It goes like this: “Your neighbor’s health is more important than your stupid, selfish freedom.” Even taken on its face, the statement is false. Living under a tyranny that can force you to alter your body is, in fact, worse than dying and that is coming from a man who was damned close to death multiple times over the past 18 months. But the statement is also silly on its face. Nobody, not one person I have read about or spoken with, is refusing the vaccine simply to exercise their freedom. They are doing so because they want to exercise the freedom to determine what’s best for their survival or long-term quality of life. This vaccine has documented side effects — anaphylaxis, myocarditis/pericarditis, heart attacks, blood clots, seizures, brain fog, Guillain-Barré syndrome, Bell’s palsy, shingles, and, yes, even death — that occur at a greater rate than any recent vaccine not approved under an emergency declaration. The unvaccinated are concerned because this shot was, in fact, rushed into mass application at an alarming rate. They are exercising their freedom because frankly, they don’t trust Anthony Fauci, who, based on first-hand accounts that have been shared with me, has been pushing a universal vaccine at every medical conference where he was given a forum for the past decade. Why? To what end?
The unvaccinated are reluctant to place their health into the hands of a CDC and/or FDA that has changed its recommendations on COVID like I change my socks. Meanwhile, Fauci has changed his mask recommendation at least thrice, and political leaders who are pushing the vaccine have proven themselves hypocrites at dinners and birthday parties, among other activities. These so-called leaders in no way instill confidence.
Speaking of hostility, CNN personalities Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo (the latter being the brother of disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who sent thousands of elderly Americans to die in nursing homes) both recently suggested that the unvaccinated should be denied health care. Perhaps we can lobotomize and sterilize them and place them in camps while we are at it.
Forgive the unvaccinated if they are a little nervous about a medical director who has lied about and, according to his FOIA-released emails, continued to cover up his affiliation with the Wuhan lab where this virus most likely originated. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., had a valid point when he said Fauci is attempting to use semantics to cover his past support with U.S. tax dollars for gain-of-function research. Why should anyone be conducting this Frankensteinian research anyway?
Each of us, every person on earth, has been forced by COVID into selecting from a short list of bad options. None of the choices are good. One may be slightly less bad than the others. None are morally superior.
The unvaccinated are trying like heck to do the same thing the vaccinated are doing. They are trying not to get sick. They are trying to survive this man-caused Holocaust. They care about their fellow man just as much as the vaccinated do. They are not anti-science or ignorant of science. The data is the rub. They see data from Israel, the most vaccinated nation on earth, demonstrating more every day that the vaccine may be completely ineffective against the Delta Variant and could, in fact, be detrimental against other variants.
I just spent 18 months in a battle royale against one of the most-deadly forms of leukemia on the planet. I took your darned vaccine. It better not screw up my transplant.
Author’s Note: After this essay was crafted, Joe Biden gave a chilling, Constitution-shredding speech on vaccine mandates cloaked in vitriol toward the unvaccinated. The totalitarian mindset of this administration makes this piece all the more pertinent.
