Twelve years ago, I got vaccinated for deployment to Iraq at the Anthrax Chapel at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Fort Sill was one of the places National Guard soldiers went to train before the big trip east to the Middle East.
The building really was a chapel before it was converted to a place soldiers lined up for vaccinations and other shots. The anthrax vaccination was as useless as our gas masks in terms of actual threats to our lives, but we all had a gas mask and we all got vaccinated against a biological attack with the anthrax virus.
During the forty-odd years I was in and out of the Army I got vaccinated for many things and had no particular ill effects beyond aches and a day of mild illness.
I got vaccinated for COVID two weeks ago and was delighted to get a vaccine I really wanted and needed. I felt that way several years ago when I got the shingles vaccine. I had two friends who had terrible cases of shingles. They, like me, had chicken pox as children, before that vaccine. Having childhood chicken pox potentially makes shingles worse as an adult. The doctor wasn't sure it was covered by insurance. I told him to give me the shot.
Vaccines are surely one of the five great medical innovations in all of human history. To be anti-vaxx is simply to be as dumb as a bag of lug nuts. Like seatbelts and motorcycle helmets, whatever the risk, it is vastly less than the risk of no seatbelt, no helmet and no vaccine.
