My social media feeds are full of this shit, stop it! Stop threatening people over getting the double-damned vaccine. No, you don’t get to take someone’s bodily autonomy away, no you don’t get to ostracize them from society, take away their civil liberties, dox them, or whatever other awful thing you came up with that sounds like it should be coming from the mouth of a comic-book villain bent on world domination. Stop screaming all over social media accusing people you’ve never met of being murderous monsters who don’t care about you and your family just because they haven’t gotten vaccinated. Repeat after me:
“A stranger has no obligation to care about my personal well-being,
and I should not expect them to do so.”
The key word there is expect. Some people have deep moral convictions regarding their responsibility to society as a whole, and that can be admirable; other people keep it to a tighter circle, being more concerned with the people they personally have connections to, and that’s also fine whether you personally think it is or not. Not being willing to take one for the team doesn’t necessarily make someone a horrible person.
Yes, some of the people who don’t want to get vaccinated are refusing because of misinformation, but being misinformed doesn’t make someone a horrible person either. Maybe they’ve been given that information by people they consider reliable sources. Maybe they’re leery because official sources kept contradicting (correcting) themselves. Maybe someone they know had a bad reaction to the vaccine and now they’re scared. Maybe they just don’t trust the government to have their best interest at heart—which it doesn’t, honestly, because governments aren’t designed to concern themselves with individual people. And maybe it’s because the terminology and protocols being referenced aren’t something they have any familiarity with and some of them just sound wrong. Admit it, if you don’t know what these fact-sheet screenshots actually mean, they’re somewhat alarming1FDA.gov, 2021, “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine EUA Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregivers” (revised 25 June 2021), https://www.fda.gov/media/144414/download,2FDA.gov, 2021, “Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine EUA Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregivers” (revised 24 June 2021), https://www.fda.gov/media/144638/download,3FDA.gov, 2021, “Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine EUA Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregivers 07122021” (revised 12 July 2021), https://www.fda.gov/media/146305/download:
These vaccines are only in use because of an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), and before the COVID party started most people had never heard of that. An emergency use authorization is made by the FDA and supported by a declaration from the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) that says, “Hey, we know this vaccine/drug hasn’t undergone the same FDA review process as a product that’s already been approved, but there’s nothing else available that works and people are dying so we really don’t have any choice here, we need permission to use this NOW.” The FDA doesn’t just rubber-stamp these things; they require evidence that the benefits of using the product outweigh the risks before they’ll make a decision about whether or not it should get a EUA. All three COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the U.S. are approved for use under a EUA because, you know, lots of people were dying and stuff. This doesn’t mean the vaccine is perfectly safe, it means it was deemed safe enough to use for now because the alternative was worse. For a majority of people, it’s been fine. It was fine for me, and for the rest of my immediate family. I may have been annoyed that the vaccine made me sick for 24 hours and brought my hot flashes back, but I was well aware that COVID-19 could kill me or that the vaccine could — three essential workers in the house, my wife has Long Covid, and I almost lost one of my relatives to a bad reaction to their second shot. It was my choice to take the risk and get an officially in-use but still officially unapproved vaccine.
Why not just approve the vaccines and be done with it? FDA review protocols are pretty strenuous, and it can take years for something to get through the whole review process to be officially approved. I may personally have…opinions about the efficacy of that process, but even still I know it exists for a damn good reason, which is trying to make sure things that are released for public consumption are generally safe for the public to consume. And in the case of emergencies like, say, a global pandemic that’s killing thousands of people every day, they can use the EUA as a safety valve to temporarily get around that precautionary process, which they did. Not to mention that at this point if the FDA did suddenly approve the vaccines, people would be even more suspicious and the conspiracy theories would proliferate like dandelions on a spring lawn and convince even MORE people that it isn’t safe to get vaccinated. The opposite of helpful, that. So we’ll have to find other ways to deal with what a lot of people see as a risk they aren’t sure they’re willing to take.
Demanding that society and government moves further down the slippery slope that leads to authoritarianism isn’t it. Screaming weirdly personal value-judgement insults at people online isn’t either. You have every right to be scared—it’s a fucking pandemic!—but so do those innocent strangers you’re yelling awful things at. So just stop, please. Because they may not be helping, but you aren’t either.
UPDATE 23August21: Pfizer’s vaccine has received full FDA approval. The government seems optimistic that this will reduce vaccine hesitancy.