I am not a medical doctor therefore, I cannot make an expert case for taking the COVID vaccine. I did it because I want to live not just exist and I want to give my children the best chance based on “now” knowledge. An article in the New York Time by Dr. Anita Sircar, an infectious-disease physician and clinical instructor of health sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine, moved me to share its substantive content with naysayers. If you are still undecided after this, god help us all.
Dr. Sircar constructed her story around an under 50 year old COVID-19 patient breathing through “plastic tubes delivering oxygen through his nose (that) hardly seemed adequate to stop his chest from heaving.” Mildly hypertensive but otherwise in good health, he had refused to take the vaccine. He, his wife and two children became infected. By the time he was hospitalized he had tried prescribed antibiotics, and hydroxychloroquine off the internet, neither worked.
He then went to a facility, “he received monoclonal antibodies, a lab-produced transfusion that substitutes for the body’s own antibodies” Neither worked. He ended up in the ER with dangerously low oxygen levels, exceedingly high inflammatory markers and patchy areas of infection all over his lungs.
Dr. Sircar says, “Last year, a case like this would have flattened me. I would have wrestled with the sadness and how unfair life was. Battled with the angst of how unlucky he was. This year, I struggled to find sympathy. It was August 2021, not 2020. The vaccine had been widely available for months in the U.S., free to anyone who wanted it, even offered in drugstores and supermarkets. Cutting-edge, revolutionary, mind-blowing, lifesaving vaccines were available where people shopped for groceries, and they still didn’t want them.”
Having worked the COVID units for 17 months straight she laments, “All day, every day. we had cared for hundreds of COVID patients. Without being able to take breaks long enough to help us recover from this unending ordeal. Compassion fatigue was setting in. For those of us who hadn’t left after the hardest year of our professional lives, even hope was now in short supply.”
She asked the patient why he decided not to get vaccinated. His response, “Well, I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anything. I was just waiting for the FDA to approve the vaccine first. I did not want to take anything experimental. I didn’t want to be the government’s guinea pig, and I don’t trust that it’s safe.” The irony she explained is that “all the COVID units were full and every single patient in them is unvaccinated.” She concluded, “Numbers don’t lie. The vaccines work.”
The doctor is angry that people are refusing the vaccines because the FDA has given only emergency-use authorization not permanent approval, yet they are turning to antibiotics, monoclonal antibodies and hydroxychloroquine, all experimental, with mixed evidence to support their use. Hydroxychloroquine alone can damage eyesight and heart.
She offered the sick patient remdesivir, recently approved by the FDA approval. She explained, “Not nearly as many doses of remdesivir have been given or studied in people and its long-term side effects are still unknown, do you still want me to give it to you?” “Yes” he responded, “Whatever it takes to save my life.” He died.
She reconciled with this death knowing that “this year, this tragedy, this unnecessary, entirely preventable loss, was on him”, not them.
According to Dr. Sircar, “More than 353 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine has been administered in the U.S.” plus “over 4.7 billion doses worldwide without any overwhelming, catastrophic side effects.” Therefore, “the burden of this pandemic now rests on the shoulders of the unvaccinated…When hundreds and thousands of people continue to die, when the most vulnerable members of society, our children, cannot be vaccinated — the luxury of choice ceases to exist…This virus will find you.”
Dr. Sircar advises, “If you believe ‘I won’t get my children vaccinated because I don’t know what the long-term effects will be’, it matters little if they don’t live long enough for you to find out. If you believe ‘I’ll just let everyone else get vaccinated around me so I don’t have to’, there are 93 million eligible, unvaccinated people in the “herd” who think the same way you do and are getting in the way of ending this pandemic. “If you believe ‘vaccinated people are getting infected anyway so what’s the point?’ The vaccine was built to prevent hospitalizations and deaths from severe illness…The vaccinated are not dying from COVID-19.”
If the expert doctor is correct, the most effective thing any of us can do to protect self, loved ones and the world, is to GET VACCINATED. Dr. Sircar ends by saying “It works.”