There's a lot of jabbering going on about the various COVID vaccines, in the sense both of jabber on all sides, and of feeling threatened by a Jabberwocky monster of a vaccine -- "Jabberwocky" as in Lewis Carroll's entertaining poem within his Through the Looking-Glass, 1871. For some folks, this Jab is a beast to avoid.
Some people don't trust vaccines, never get 'flu shots and don't intend to get a corona jab -- at which point some commentators accuse them of being mass murderers. What the accusers need to remember is that we have certain Constitutional rights in this country, such as the right to Security of the Person and the right to Freedom of Speech -- meaning freedom to discuss scientific information, opinions around health, and personal choices.
Not all vaccines are equal in character, efficacy, or safety. The COVID ones were designed in a hurry. It is the job of media to convey information about them to the lay person who wishes to decide as an individual whether to receive what is really something of a shot in the dark. Disconcertingly, the magazine of one prominant seniors' organization has attacked other media outlets for presenting all aspects of the debate and the science.
The word "vaccine" comes from "vacca", cow, because the original smallpox vaccine came from bovine (cow) viruses, and subsequent disease vaccines kept the same name. Similarly, the word inoculate means to inject the bud (or "eye", hence "ocular") of a virus into the body of a patient. How surprising is it that some people are leery of this impregnation, this invasion by a separate body? A jabberwock-ic threat indeed, to those who value "security of the person". What could be more personal than other people putting things into your body? What, if you didn't invite it, more like an assault?
It's enough to make some folks "frumious" -- to quote Carroll again -- and pretty "mimsy" about "galumphing" off to any clinic.
Some people think anything is preferable to a chance of catching this cruel sinister COVID virus, and they are perfectly entitled to think that. They have good reasons for their position. What they should not do (often with the best of healthcare-provider intentions) is bully and chivvy others into thinking the same, if others decide differently.
We have freedom to marry whom we like, smoke what we like, we have voting rights, reproductive rights, medically assisted dying rights and so on … but surely the most fundamental of all is the right to dominion over our own bodies. The final decision about what goes into them, is ours.
Seniors' organizations are particularly keen on chivvying seniors into taking the COVID jab. Don't bother your little grey heads with all that anti-science vaccine hesitancy, they're saying. But actually the science is all over the place as regards vaccine research, and plenty of seniors are quite capable of doing their own research.
This is the "Boomer" generation, practised fact-finders, the folks who invented critical thinking, doing-your-own-thing and not necessarily believing what "the establishment" says. We're still the same cussed folks we've always been, who think the concept of bodily integrity is important.
Right now we only have slithy and uffish people waving "vorpal swords" (needles?) at us, but when the law starts to corrode our right to move freely about, to keep jobs and housing and go to the theatre without a "Vaccination Passport" -- then another kind of "shot" will be heard -- the one sent across the bow of anti-choice. Herd immunity may or may not be a possibility, but being herded is a definite hazard, and one which many will frumiously resist.
