(edit: wow I thought we were, as a collective, Largely Over It now—guess that's not the case! I'm glad things aren't as bad as they are in this thread where I live! one has to wonder though: how long will this deep-seated emotion-based discrimination go on for?)
In spite of this, neither doctor was initially willing to put their opinion on paper so I could keep my job because of the immense pressure on them to get everyone vaccinated. Thank God, the specialist I saw came back in the room with a change of heart and wrote me the letter.
Interacting with society during this whole time felt quite upsetting. It really felt as if society in general would rather see me risk dying as long as it kept them safer.
Being forced to go into my personal medical history to justify my choices was a weird experience.
I really feel for people who've had to deal with that sort of thing for longer than the brief period of time I have.
Try having a non-visible disability. It's a pretty common thing, actually. It even kinda falls in the same category - one of the workplace duties is to be vaccinated, and you have extenuating circumstances which require an affordance since you can't meet that duty.
School teachers, for a very long time, were required to be vaccinated against TB. There's a long history of requiring vaccinations if you work or are exposed to other vulnerable folks.
* couldn't visit restaurants
* couldn't fly/take a train/take a ferry
Still can't:
* Visit my grandparents at their retirement home
* Visit the USA
The general opinion as that you should be vaccinated, but it mostly doesn't come up now. The government is currently passing legislation so they can better mandate vaccination to medical professionals as well as suppress dissenting opinions by those professionals.
Based on the words and actions of the federal government, i've definitely felt like a second class citizen.
Why is that okay?
New flu vaccines are developed annually because it’s a seasonal illness, which makes them just as “experimental” or “novel” as many COVID vaccines such as AstraZeneca that aren’t using mRNA technology.
Why is suddenly everyone up in arms about something they were fine with before?
When you can answer this honestly you’ll start to understand the problem.
The Novavax subunit vaccine is at least an older approach, but assembling the protein fragments onto a particle is a new thing.
I'm so out of the loop about this stuff because it hasn't affected my life in any way in months, so this is me genuinely asking to see where people are at with this stuff. I have a feeling that many people got the initial shot and maybe one booster thereafter but since then haven't kept up… but this is just an assumption, and a pretty big one at that. no idea about the non-injectables whatsoever.
The one released this fall is targeted more closely at post-Omicron strains (dominant in most of 2022). Something like 15% of the country has gotten it, and only ~1/3 of the more vulnerable older folks. There's studies coming out regularly demonstrating that it is more protective against currently circulating virus than the initial vaccine.
Covid deaths are still in the hundreds per day. Deaths continue to be concentrated in high risks groups and the risk of dying once infected continues to be higher among the unvaccinated.