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This turns out to be long-I am just thinking with my keyboard. Key summary for all this below: I keep an open mind. (the rest is just me thinking of it. It is a way I keep track of these things in my life-I write them down...:)

I keep an open mind on most things dealing with the human condition. Sure there are a lot of things I just accept, but...there are things we don't know about, and I try to avoid ruling them in or out of things. Things like ESP, auras, ect. I don't know enough about.

But I see, hear, and occasionally feel things that make me withhold judgement.

Like the woman in on some American farm in WWII who had a son in the Navy serving on the USS Indianapolis when she was sunk at 15 minutes after midnight on July 30th, 1945.

Back home, just after noon time, his mother was out in a field on their farm, and she was overcome with a feeling that something terrible had happened to their son, and he was in grave danger. Her husband came over, and she said "Something terrible has happened to John. We need to pray for him."

And in the middle of that field, they dropped to their knees and began to pray for their son.

He didn't make it back.

But the husband and wife apparently talked about it after the fact, and the timing was a little too well aligned to be just a feeling that was internally generated. They both said it had been right after lunch on that day, at the same time the ship was hit by the torpedoes on the opposite side of the Earth, 12 hours behind them.

So in that light, I try to avoid drawing conclusions about some aspects of the human condition too lightly.

In the case of vaccines, I keep an open mind.

I think the human immune system is one of the most unbelievably awesome things designed by God, right up there with self-repairing skin.

The sheer hubris, that we understand it well enough to accurately engineer it, is astonishing.

Comparatively speaking, we are like apes poking a stick in a hole in the ground, because we learned that if we do that, a tasty bug will come out. That is why genetic engineering fills me with dread. It is that arrogant ignorance that some people of knowledge fully embrace. It is embodied in "Hey. What could go wrong?"

When I joke "Hey. What could go wrong?" as I try to fish my dropped keys from a storm grate with a coat hanger, it is one thing.

It is quite a different thing when people wearing lab coats manipulating data on supercomputers (in their quest to design some artificial vaccine to trick the human immune system do something they want) actually ACT as if they are spouting "Hey. What could go wrong?"

Ah. What could go wrong? Perhaps you could make a mistake and turn the human immune system into something that eats its host? And does so in an extraordinarily perverse way (because it is engineering it is completely artificial) that it frustrates our frantic efforts to stop the immune system from trying to save itself? Sure. Maybe I have seen too many movies or read too many books.

But I have seen too many Titanics go down because of the smug, arrogant experts who thought they had all the fruits from The Tree of Knowledge, and knew exactly what was going to happen.

Only to see their ship go down.

Or too many Leftists importing some foreign insect to fix an issue with some native flora or fauna,

Only to see the foreign insect destroy not just the flora or fauna they were trying to control, but an entire ecosystem.

And in both cases, the look of utter puzzlement on their faces, you can almost hear them thinking "How did this happen? I had it all thought out."

Anyway, vaccines.

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NOTE: I am indeed projecting my emotions onto my siblings below. I base it on conversations we have as adults, and on the way that, as I got older, I realized that it was one of those odd things in the human existence bonds a lot of people together. Spiders do that. So do needles.

With Needles, almost everyone has a emotion or gate in their mind from that time when you, as a young child, had to consciously face having a metal object injected painfully into your flesh, and it sets a framework in life for you. And then, as I got older, realized that while everyone has to go through many of the same things in life, it is a certainty that everyone, in their own complex mind, will handle it in their own way.

When I was growing up as a military dependent, my five siblings and I got vaccinated early and often with everything under the sun because we deployed overseas with my Dad in Japan and The Philippines.

Yellow Fever, Bubuonic Plague, Cholera, Smallpox, Typhus, you name it. I still have my shot record from the Navy, both as a kid and a sailor, and there were a lot of entries in them. (FYI: Of all the shots we got, we almost universally agree to this day that the Cholera vaccination was the one that hurt your arm for days, and made you sick as a dog for some part of that. One of the worst (or at least most memorable) pains of my life was a day or two after we got the Cholera shot, my right deltoid was pink, swollen, and painful, and my older brother slugged me in in the shoulder during some harassing interaction between us. That pain ranked up there in life with kidney stones and taking a slapshot directly to the front of the big toe.)

Those were trying times for my family. My mother had to corral us under false pretenses and herd us into the 1964 white Chrysler New Yorker station wagon (with red leather interior!) My mom would tell us we were going food shopping or on some other errand, but invariably someone like my younger brother would blurt out "Hey! This isn't the way to the Navy Exchange!" and the gig was over.

The dread would begin. Shots. We were going for shots. We were doomed. There was no way out. No way to delay it. We were all going to our Room 101.

Each of us, in our own private way, would wrestle the seed of fear that was inside us. We went the gamut from me (hating needles, but determined just to get it over with) and my younger sister who, largely through fear, turned into an admirable combination of a crazy badger and a wailing banshee.

Me? I cowered sweating in the corner until my mother pointed at me and called me over, and filled with hatred for needles and for the process itself, shoved out my shoulder to get it over with. I hated being afraid of being stuck with a needle.

But not my little sister.

While she no doubt hated needles just as much as I did, she wasn't going to go without a fight. She was a little bit of a thing, a miniature person we towered over, but she wasn't going to go to her fate in mute terror as I did. She would kick, shreik, bite, kick, she would never surrender. She was like a Tasmanian Devil. They once had to call my Dad over from the Navy Administation building near the hospital to subdue her. He could get her to hold still by commanding her, but multiple just couldn't handle her. Heh, I think she may have simply been too small for them, and it was like two or three adults trying to control an crazed, contorting squirrel!

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Anyway, Vaccines!

Still, in my entire life, I never missed school or work due to illness. Heh, not even feigned illness in grade school, though I did try multiple times. I have missed school or work for various surgeries for trauma and such, but never been "sick" although, to be fair, when I was sick, I wouldn't let it slow me down.

Point is you could get one vaccine, and if the biology of your body is inclined, you will get sick. Or, you could get dozens of inoculations, and if your body is so inclined, you won't get sick.

Just how it is.

To be fair: If I grew up today, they would have me classified with ADD in a heartbeat and pumping me full of Ritalin. It isn't even a question. So, sure. I fully concede that could be something. But my experience in health care with a lot of people indicates there is some validity to that observation.