The Fiction Of A COVID-19 Vaccine
I am quite easily the most pro-vaccine person I know. I have gotten every vaccination possible, even for illnesses I can not catch but can spread like HPV. I have done this in order to guarantee my own health as well as the health of others, and mocking the anti-vaccine movement is regular conversation around my family.
There’s this idea in the modern world that the only form of treatment for an illness is a vaccination. While vaccinations have been amazing in terms of treating many illnesses, they should only be seen as a tool in the box of medical science, not the entire box. Hence why you have heard this nonstop talk about a COVID-19 vaccine, but you have heard nothing about doctors who have managed to (and this is an incredibly simplified version) turn off the illness itself.
Why is the President not talking about this 24/7? Why isn’t every cable news program inviting these doctors on to discuss just how big of a breakthrough this would be? Well the answer is because vaccines look better to the general public than any other form of medicine.
This is not the fault of the general public mind you. One common point among anti-vaxxers is that a certain number of children have been harmed or even killed by taking a vaccine. Of course, this is true, but only because vaccinations have become so widespread that eventually somebody is going to have a bad side effect. However, instead of pointing that out, the average media talking head would much rather deny such a thing is even possible because vaccines are safe.
Lets talk about what COVID-19 is. Many people know this illness as simply “the Coronavirus,” however calling it that is highly misleading — as it is far from the only Coronavirus. MERS, for example, is a form of the Coronavirus. The common cold, which we have been working on a vaccination for for the past sixty years, is a strain of the Coronavirus.
No strain of the Coronavirus has ever received a vaccination, and if one is found it would be worthy of a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Yet, the President is promising us a vaccination will be created by the end of the year — even going so far as to promise one by the start of November, which is less than two months from now.
The fastest vaccination ever developed took four years. The average vaccination takes around a decade to properly develop, yet in less than a year the President wants us to believe he can create a vaccination.
And this is ignoring the sheer amount of safety testing that has been skipped and will need to be skipped if the President wants to meet this deadline. The Ebola Vaccination has been worked on since around 2014, it didn’t start safety testing until 2016 and was not approved by the FDA until 2019. That was a much more deadly illness than COVID-19, although it did not spread nearly as easily.
Once again, the President wants us to ignore that and instead just trust him to develop a vaccination in a few months. The President wants us to believe that he can fit around one thousand days of safety days of safety testing into sixty — or around one eighteenth of the time.
The idea that such a thing is possible represents more fiction than fact.
