Letter to an anti-vaxxer

This is fictitious, based on true stories. You’re having a hard time right now. How could you not? From the Prime Minister to your friends, people are pressuring you for not wanting to put a substance in your arm that could be the mark of the devil, make you infertile, worse, kill you. Your vaccinated neighbour avoids you. You can’t go to the movies or your favourite restaurant.

Big Pharma is against you. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and Facebook are against you. Anytime you post anything not on mainstream media, Facebook takes it down. Then you must go and look for it and try to put it up all over again. You are trying to save your vaccinated friends from vaccines, but they are blocking you. Now they are trying to shame you.

So you are huddling, staying in, staying put, venturing only to anti-vaccine protest marches where you wandered free, maskless, mingled closely with other unvaccinated people. And even that was ruined as fellow protestors were hauled off by police into vans.

The “vaxxed” ask why you don’t vaccinate. You say nothing because they won’t understand. All your life, the institutions, leaders, the very ones who are now asking you to take the vaccine have let you down. The education system, the legal system, the infrastructure (real headaches with water, roads, transport), employers without compassion, police who don’t intervene when you need them.

This is your chance to say “NO” to them. They were never there for you. NOW they are coming to you, saying do it for the public good, take the vaccine so you don’t infect the ill or elderly who would not survive. Well, to hell with that.

You don’t trust them. Not the doctors, not the scientists, not the government, not the opposition, not anyone in power. They are all lying. Yes, you would rather die than take their vaccine.

The doctors who say unvaccinated people are filling up the morgues, the government ministers who say vaccines work. You don’t believe them. You tune out the voices. Blah blah blah Omicron here, that Delta is dominant, that its claimed children, that 98 per cent of people dead are unvaccinated, that over 2,200 are dead, that there are almost 12,000 active that T&T recently recorded the highest deaths globally. They say this is not an experimental vaccine, it’s a different one, tweaked for a new unknown virus, that scientists have been making vaccines since 1798 and they are throwing everything they have to respond to this unknown virus, that in NY there are few to no deaths as 98 per cent of New Yorkers are vaccinated.

You don’t want to hear that you could get infected after taking the vaccine, but you won’t die. You’re so over it.

What’s this? You don’t want to know. You put a finger in your ears and sing “lalalalalalala”. Oh, what’s this? You feel feverish, and now you’re coughing; you lie down as you’re tired, and you can’t even smell the herbal tea your husband brought for you.

Day 1: You wake with a sore throat and a headache.

Day 2: Your body is aching, and now you have diarrhoea. You try to look up symptoms, but your eyes are red and irritated, and you can’t see the phone.

Day 3: Your fingers are discoloured.

You call for your husband, but you only hear coughing.

Day 4: Your big son, who lives at home, backs out of the room quickly after leaving you some juice and a sandwich by the door.

Day 5: You close your eyes and are jolted awake by the movement of an ambulance and try to say it’s just a cold, but you can’t seem to speak, and your chest hurts.

Day 6: You’re in an ICU ward, you’re isolated, and you’re struggling to breathe, feeling like you swallowed fire. Someone feeds you foreign substances. Medicine, and you don’t know what’s in it.

But you want it as it could save you.

Day 7: Men in Hazmat suits looking like aliens silently walk in and out with shields and goggles. You see four bodies being wheeled out. You tell the heavily masked nurse you want the vaccine, but she doesn’t hear you, you haven’t spoken maybe, you just think you have. Someone inserts a tube into your mouth.

Day 8: Fire in your lungs. No air. You can’t remember where you are. You hear someone saying your husband died, and your son is ill too.

Day 9: Your lips move to ask for your son, but no sound comes out.

Day 10: The undertaker is here for fresh COVID corpses. Its Russian Roulette now. Who lives. Who dies. I wonder if the last thoughts in your head as a doctor sedates is that you may be right about authoritative figures abusing power but wrong about the scientist and medical professionals holding your hand in what may be your final moments.