Imagine—Christmas morning you are handed a gaudily wrapped present, intriguingly heavy. Peeling away the paper you see the iconic white Apple box. Wow! It must be either an iPad or a laptop. What a gift!
Your heart rate increases, pupils dilate, hands moisten in anticipation.
You open the box, and therein is a book “Essentials of Geometry.” What? I got all worked up over a geometry book?
That is essentially how vaccines work. Your body is presented with a substance that looks like something bad, and your immune system gets all fired up, but you don’t get the badness.
If you have read my stuff over the years, you probably know that I am more than a little skeptical of things medical. Between egos, vast amounts of money, and over-dramatization of medicine, who knows where the truth lies. So what about the vaccine?
I am a health care provider, and I have had plenty of exposures. A guy who is COVID-19 positive gets stabbed in the face, I can’t Zoom him closed. I would be an early vaccine candidate.
I looked at the numbers. 44,000 people got the Pfizer vaccine with at least two month follow up. No one died. Good start. 90{50531db320f8e8a316d79d6a285e47c71b6e4f6739df32858cb86474d7e720e9} got an antibody response, meaning their immune system reacted as it should. A fair number felt fairly lousy after the vaccine but got over it in a day or so. I felt that way after the shingles vaccine.