I worked in Healthcare. I saw this stuff going on. It was very difficult for me. I took the vaccine for COVID very early, when it became available to first responders, working in a job that required me to be onsite. And I did it even though in my eyes, we fully understood just what COVID was and how dangerous it was around the middle-to-end of April 2020. And when I watched what happened in the next two years, it left a mark on me I have not been able to erase.
With the vaccine, I never thought “everyone should be mandated to get it”. I abhor that mindset.
I got it because I felt it helped patients feel safer and calmer in coming to the hospital, the same reason I got the flu shot every year at the behest of the hospital that employed me all those years. I don’t get sick often, almost never. In 40 years, mostly working at the same hospital (a rarity these days)
I got an annual flu shot, which makes my life easier because my wife doesn’t feel the same way about these things. I have always been more of a “natural immunity” person, because...knock on wood...I cannot even remember getting the flu, and only rarely, once every few years, get a cold.
For years, you could refuse the annual vaccine, but if you did, you wouldn’t get a special sticker for your badge which was visible to others, and would be required to wear a mask between November and March (I think). I didn’t do it because growing up, my family traveled extensively overseas (my dad was career Navy) so we were pumped full of vaccinations that other kids never got, Yellow Fever, Bubonic Plague, Cholera, things like that. (The Cholera one was the worst-all six of us kids got sick as a dog for two days, and our arms where we got the shot were inflamed a deep red and were VERY sore)
And myself, going into the Navy, got all those weird vaccinations again. Point is, vaccines in my life were no big deal to me. I got them when asked, encouraged, and eventually...mandated.
And in 2023, there were rumblings early in that summer that the hospital was going to make the Flu and the COVID vaccines mandatory in the fall. I agonized over this, because it was clear to me that the vaccine was far more of a potential risk, but even more, because they planned to made it mandatory. When I say I agonized over this, that word it correct.
For about six months, it was the first thing I thought of in the morning, and obsessively throughout the day. It was tearing me apart inside, and I wondered if I should quit. My career would essentially end, because all the highly specialized knowledge I had that was a mix of clinical experience and IT experience would not get me a job outside of healthcare. I couldn’t go to another hospital.
Then, they made the vaccinations voluntary.
Thing is, all of this made me very disillusioned and resentful towards something I had spent nearly my entire adult life working at, something I was good at, at a hospital I believed was very hight quality, they valued and respected me, and I absolutely felt like I was making a positive difference with respect to both patients and my co-workers, due to the nature of my job.
And I wasn’t ready to give all that up. But initially, at the end of 2020, a lot of people did leave due to those policies.
It was distressing to me to see the way the entire medical community, which should have known better, completely bought into this hoax involving the way ÇOVID was perceived and presented to the world. COVID itself was not a hoax, it was real, but they made it appear far more deadly than it actually was, and I have never been able to look at medicine the way I did before.
Before my eyes, I saw Medicine become an ARM of the government, instead of an ancillary entity that it had been. I don’t feel the same way about it, so this loss of trust has been very deep and real to me.
But just as much or even more so, the response people had to the entire COVID thing deeply affected my view of people in general, and not in a good way. If people were sheep, that would have been one thing, because I have always viewed my fellow humans as herd animals to a degree. But with COVID my fellow humans weren’t just sheep, they were sheep with words and weapons they used in anger to coerce and compel me.
COVID itself was not a hoax, it was real, but they made it appear far more deadly than it actually was, and I have never been able to look at medicine the way I did before. This article from COVID that Laz posted remains a keeper. To quote fellow FReepers,
“ “[The disease] can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, “Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”……. “Yep, just a natural mutation of SARS. No bio-warfare engineering here. None. Nope.”
It sounds like more of a nerve agent. Scary stuff.
Why, it’s almost as if it was engineered to kill in multiple ways….
While the food fights we had on FR about Covid being the flu or something Really Bad were something else, we all recognized that it wasn’t each other who were the Bad Guys.
Even when the shots came out, there were MANY people on FR who took the shots out of economic necessity, or were in the high-risk zip code. Don’t forget kids, the late JimRob took the shot, and nobody would dare call him a sheep.
In general, we kept our cool.
However…the people like the article’s writer…..THEY looked down at us. Called us names. Marginalized us. Got us fired. Doxxed us. And then, the Bad Guys mandated the shots.
I said this repeatedly....I will not criticize anyone for their personal health decision. Remember my body, my choice? It works both ways. Utility curve optimization isn't in the Constitution, nor my personal code.
And yet, these "approved" shots - which have caused familial and societal strife, vective, unrest, unemployment, and brought us to a Constitutional "crisis" where three lawyers on SCOTUS thought it was peachy for OSHA to enact a mandate without congressional approval - remain in effect under an EUA where the BASIS was PREVENTION. And now, Prevention has now gone down the memory hole, and now any time we see statistics on the shot it’s in stopping a hospital visit or one-way trip to the morgue.
We’ve moved on from COVID, for the most part. Now, we debate Iran, the midterms, policy choices, and other things. Often we agree, many times not. Usually, we remain civil.
But for the likes of the article’s writer…
….what will bother them, is that we figured them out. They hold no sway over us. And THEY are the enemies of America’s principles.
And often, we laugh at them.