If Looks Could Kill

I've asked this question before, but, if Covid was as visible as Smallpox, would anti-vaxxers still be anti-vax?

The boy on the right was vaccinated, the boy on the left was not. pic.twitter.com/Up6l36NCG6

— D Villella ❄️ (@dvillella) September 29, 2021

Ever seen a picture of an intubation? Ever seen somebody intubated? It’s not the old oxygen tent, or the plastic face mask, or even the nose plugs strapped on your head. The tube is inserted deep down the throat. The patient is in an induced coma. It’s the only way to keep the patient calm enough to tolerate the tube 24/7.

Ever seen a picture of smallpox? I hadn’t, not until today. Oh, I must have sometime in 66 years. But I don’t remember it. I could find them on the internet, if I ever thought to look. You can find diagrams, cross-section drawings of intubations. You just have to look for them. Does that make any difference?

I knew adults crippled by poliomyelitis in childhood. They were my parents contemporaries. My parents grew up with many of the childhood diseases I was vaccinated against. We all got the polio vaccine as soon as it was available. I still think it’s the experience of that which made us accept vaccines. Thanks to vaccines, some of us think all of us are safe. Or that we were never in danger.

Is seeing believing? I’ve long quit thinking so. Believing is believing. My daughter is alive because of medicine. She has a puppy now, and calls the vet to be sure it’s safe to give the dog Benadryl when he’s stung by a bee, or more likely eats one. But she tells me she doesn’t trust doctors, because. Just because. Obviously she doesn’t quite mean it, because she’s fully vaccinated, takes medicine for a chronic condition, visits doctors regularly for the same reason. Does she see the results? Well, she’s not dead. But does she question the need for medicine? No, not really. She trusts; but she thinks it wise to say she doesn’t trust.

Believing is believing. That’s all there is to it. Pictures can be denied. Experiences can be reimagined, reinterpreted, just flat rejected. I’ve seen people do it. We believe, but we don’t call it belief; that’s because it’s trust. We trust, though we probably can’t name what it is we trust. We just do.

Can we change our trust easily? No. Often that’s the problem: what we trust, is not trustworthy. But we don’t even know we trust it. We don’t know what’s wrong. We’re just sure the problem is not us, not what we trust. That means the problem has to be something else. So would a picture change our beliefs? Not likely.

If it would, the pictures already on the internet would have certainly changed more hearts and minds.

Setting all that aside, the resistance to the Covid vaccine has nothing to do with vaccines.

Unless they were raised by wolves & never encountered the American education system, every person who is complaining about mandatory Covid vaccine is really saying, “I was fine with the first dozen or so vaccines I had to take but the 13th is a gross violation of my rights.”

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) September 29, 2021

There’s a lot of that going around. Although it’s not as strongly held a belief as some might think.