A pandemic diary: My passport
April 26, 2021
On sound advice from the experts, I’m not going to show y’all my Covid vaccination card. However, I see no harm in displaying my longstanding personal vaccination passport, ironclad proof that I’ve got the goods. No codes to scan, no factors to verify. Ready? Okay, scroll down a bit.
That’s it. Me, taken at 2:01 pm on 4/23/2021 (full cellphone camera data available on request). It shows I’m alive and healthy, which I might not be without some previous mass vaccination campaigns, none of which became controversial or politicized.
The most important was for polio, which used to paralyze thousands every year, killing some. The peak polio season in the summer triggered some familiar emergency measures: swimming pools and theaters closed and parents kept their children away from parties and playgrounds. Even in the 60s, there were kids who’d been afflicted and were wearing leg braces.
I got the historic Salk vaccine before I was old enough to remember it, but I clearly recall swallowing a sugar cube containing Sabin, the follow-up version, in grade school. We didn’t yet have vaccines for all the common childhood diseases, and I ran the table. I caught mumps when I was about four, followed a few years later by chicken pox, measles, and two bouts with rubella.
A lot of today’s vaccine-hesitant mopes were probably born late enough to escape all this and take their good health for granted. I don’t. I came through without any long-term damage, but one of my mother’s sisters had developmental disabilities because my grandmother was exposed to rubella while pregnant. From 1958 through 1962, the year before the first measles vaccine rolled out, the country averaged over half a million cases and 430 deaths a year. Hundreds of thousands suffered respiratory complications, even encephalitis.
Call me what you will: I’m amazed that we’re hardly even discussing mandatory Covid vaccination. I know you can’t make the horses drink. Still: We had measles under control until anti-vax and religious fanatics opened the door to fresh outbreaks.
Now Connecticut is moving to end the religious exemption to vaccinating kids for school, as New York and several other states have already done. If that’s a public health threat, what about people who deliberately leave themselves, their families, and everyone in their communities at risk of a terrible death?
Originally published at http://davesswan.wordpress.com on April 23, 2021.
