Or at least Covid anti-vaxxers would like to believe. Brian Broome talks about them in WaPo:
I recently had the opportunity to hear a 95-year-old man speak on the subject of covid-19. When asked if he’d gotten the vaccine, he responded that he received it as soon as it was available. He went on to say that, in his long life, he has seen this behavior over and over again with regard to vaccines. He has lived through the people who were smarter than the measles vaccine and the mumps vaccine, smallpox, polio; there has always been a percentage of the population that refused them.
I am following the lead of the man who lived to be 95 years old. Not some dude from Daytona Beach with an Internet connection who believes that his immune system alone will storm the castle should covid’s time come. Daytona Beach dude does not want to be told what to do. None of us do.
There are those who refuse the vaccine simply because they do not like the current administration. This, I believe, to be little more than pouting, a child holding his breath in the grocery store as a protest for not getting a cookie before checkout.
Last week I had the pleasure of talking with a gentleman in Michigan in his eighties, presumably embedded in the Evangelical community (I didn’t ask, but context suggests it). He’d been fully vaccinated for Covid, he and his wife had spent time in the hospital recovering from Covid before the vaccination, and he had no time, no patience, for the anti-vaxxers. I don’t think he considers them to be adults.
And while Broome may be right about this:
I do not understand the unvaccinated. Is their fear that medical science is trying to poison half of the United States? Half the world? I guess it all comes down to trust. And yes, in the end, you can do with your own body whatever you please. But I cannot ignore how few cases of measles, smallpox, mumps and polio we deal with these days. I based my choice on that.
I have to wonder how much of this has to do with postmodernity, how much it’s people certain that they can yell or pray the virus into submission.
I mean, if you’re convinced that you have a personal relationship with God, well, how can you need a vaccine to survive.
