Vaccines shouldn’t be a political debate

I remember the good ol’ days when a political debate was over tax rates, government spending, “big government” versus “small government” and social policies.

I miss those days.

Nowadays, one of the biggest political debates raging is over COVID-19 vaccines.

Really?!

Never in a million years would I have ever believed that whether to get a vaccine that wards off a potentially deadly virus would become some sort of political football.

Vaccines have been a part of many of our lives from infancy. Throughout our childhood, we got vaccines and boosters when they were due. I, like many others, have that funny little mark on my left shoulder from a vaccine.

As science advanced, so did the vaccines. New vaccines were developed to combat diseases that had previously taken the lives of those who contracted them.

Measles and mumps have been, for all practical purposes, wiped out, with just rare outbreaks occurring. The development of the polio vaccine in the mid-1950s was a game changer, and people no longer feared the dreaded “summer scourge” that paralyzed thousands of people each year.

There’s even a chickenpox vaccine now. It no longer has to be an extremely uncomfortable rite of passage for kids like it was when I was young.

Schools require students to be up to date on their vaccines. If they’re not, they don’t get to come to school.

But somehow, the discussion over COVID-19 vaccines has become a political debate, and I’m flummoxed. A virus does not care about one’s political ideology.

Maybe it’s because the Trump administration regularly downplayed the severity of the virus, and the supporters of that administration see its views as infallible.

They seem to forget, though, that the same administration launched Operation Warp Speed in an attempt to cut red tape and develop an effective vaccine in record time.

Many of the people that lauded Operation Warp Speed a year ago are the same people who are now refusing to get a vaccine. Why?

Is it solely because a new administration — one of a different political party — has taken over the vaccination effort?

I used to joke that the state of politics in the U.S. was such that if one political party miraculously found a cure for cancer and world hunger, the other party would fight it just because it didn’t come from their own party. I guess I wasn’t that far off in my assessment.

I hear a lot of people hollering “freedom!” However, with freedom comes responsibility. Freedom without responsibility is anarchy.

Yes, we have great freedoms and are free to exercise them. But we also must exercise those freedoms with responsibility. Just because I am free to do something, doesn’t necessarily make it right or responsible to do it.

Some people say they’ve done their own research into the vaccines.

I consider myself a relatively smart guy with knowledge in a wide array of topics, but what research can I do that can compete with the research done by scientists and doctors with years, even decades, of experience and expertise in the field of infectious diseases?

Watching some YouTube videos and sharing memes on Facebook does not constitute real scientific research into the matter.

COVID-19 is back on the rise, and statistics show that about 97 percent of those who got it this time around are unvaccinated. Yes, there are small numbers of vaccinated people who still get infected, because no vaccine is 100 percent effective.

We have it in our ability to put a stop to this. Please, get your vaccine if you haven’t already done so.

Even if you don’t do it for yourself, do it for your family, friends, neighbors and community.