Ignorant: Lacking Knowledge; Uneducated.
I got involved on Facebook in a conversation about the vaccine.
I try to stay uninvolved, except to make sure that people are educated. I don’t post all over Facebook “educating” people, but I do volunteer – or at least, I did when it mattered – in areas where people didn’t know they could get a vaccine at a nearby clinic. That they could get a vaccine free, without proof of identity, without a green card. That they could get a vaccine without any fear whatsoever. So I went door-to-door telling them that a vaccine was available.
Most people know now that the vaccine is widely available, that it protects people from getting COVID. Most people also know that there have been “breakthrough” infections among the vaccinated. But the vast majority of those who are vaccinated get better quickly, require almost no hospitalizations, and almost never die from COVID, thanks to the vaccine.
So when someone said, “It’s a personal choice and I respect that!” – it sounded to me as if that person was not educated. While it is, indeed, a literal choice to be vaccinated or not vaccinated, this “choice” has to consider the lives of those around us.
Unvaccinated people get COVID at a far higher rate than vaccinated people. And it’s highly contagious. And if you’re sick, you can spread the disease before you even show symptoms. After all this time, people might know that.
But this person still does not seem to know. “Anyone can spread COVID,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re vaccinated or unvaccinated. If I don’t want to get a vaccine, that’s my choice. I’m not hurting anyone.”
Well, I thought, you’re hurting yourself. You’re hurting your family. You’re hurting your friends. You’re hurting everyone around you who is subjected to COVID because you decided not to get a vaccine.
Somehow, as if they live under a rock, there are still people who truly believe that they aren’t hurting anyone else by not being vaccinated themselves. The word for that: ignorant. The definition of ignorant: lacking knowledge; uneducated.
Do they have any idea how diseases are eradicated? Don’t they understand that if fewer people get COVID, then we could eventually destroy COVID?
I didn’t want to argue with Mrs. Personal Choice. Thankfully someone stepped in – a person who works in a hospital. The nurse talked about the sick people who were still flooding the hospital – unable to breathe, unable to get a ventilator. This time, though, she says, more young adults and children are in the hospital. They are running out of beds. She wanted to know: who should tell the parents of a young child, unable to breathe, that there’s no bed for that child, or no ventilator available?
Without missing a beat, the woman swore that she wasn’t causing anyone else to get sick. And I bowed out of the conversation because, quite honestly, there isn’t any way to make the ignorant suddenly turn into educated people. Ignorant people believe what they want to believe, what they are told by other ignorant people. There is no way to disseminate facts to people who refuse to listen.
At this point, people who are still choosing to remain unvaccinated are choosing themselves over everybody else. They are allowing the virus to continue – and they will eventually allow the virus to win. As long as there are people who can get COVID, there will be people who will get COVID.
And as long as people are here to get it, COVID will jump from host to host to host, putting the whole world at risk. And the people who are getting it – if they’re not dead – will continue to scream, “It’s not my fault!”
As if.