Vaccine

      News this morning is that Emergency Use Approval is all but assured for the first vaccine in the pipeline.  Logistics are being arranged so that the first mass inoculations will follow approval almost immediately.

      There still seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around about the vaccine and my usual response would be to provide accurate information to counter it.  You know what?  I'm not going to do that.  Even with distribution limited to health care workers and the very elderly, supplies are small and will increase slowly at first.  There aren't enough shots for the people who need them and want them, let alone the reluctant.

      So skip it, doubters.  You think Bill Gates and Red Chinese will zotz you with a tracker chip in the vaccine?  Then avoid it.  Oh, there's one exception, kind of: if you are a healthcare worker and you don't trust the vaccine, I beg you to find another line of work, something like lighthouse keeper or work-from-home data entry, where you won't have much human contact.

      Some percentage (a large and increasing one) of the vaccine-avoiders will contract the virus and fall ill, just like the general population of not-yet-vaccinated people.  But the avoiders will have, at least, chosen it.  Some percentage (a small but stable share) of the avoiders who fall ill will die, and that's a set of shots saved for someone who needed and wanted them.  It's a public service.  Please, avoiders, do your part to help out and try to die quietly at home, without wasting medical resources and exposing doctors, nurses and hospital workers to even more risk.

      I am sick and tired of rumor-mongers spreading nonsense and black/gray propaganda, most of it from outlets known to be controlled by nations hostile to our own.  I am sick and tired of people who think their opinion and semi-anonymous social media postings outweigh expert testimony, people who won't bother to fact check anything that agrees with their position.*  It's a real pandemic, with real doctors, nurses and drug companies trying to do something to mitigate it.  For all its failings, Big Pharma wants you to live a long, long life: once you're dead, they can't sell you any more pills.  You don't want to take your medicine?  Then don't, and don't complain when Nature takes its course.
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* I'm going between multiple authoritative sources of statistical data for things like infection rate and hospital occupancy in my own state.  They don't always agree, but it is interesting that the trendlines track closely.  There's metadata in that, even without number-crunching, and it clearly reveals when things are improving or getting worse.  But note well: I am checking up on the veracity of data that tends to confirm my beliefs, and looking into sources that disagree.  It's the only way I know to keep from following expectations instead of reality.