No, Vaccines Are Not Primarily About Protecting Others

Another day, another ill-fated attempt to guilt people into the “do it for your community” lie. The government establishment in this country has been overwhelmingly successful in guilting Americans into collectivist thinking, selling each non-pharmaceutical intervention (and now a pharmaceutical one) as the only proper and righteous response for individuals who truly care about their fellow man.

It may very well be that a good number of Americans truly believe that things like masks, distancing, and now vaccines are an expression of love for those around them, but we don’t have to look very hard to see the signs that these same people don’t truly believe any of this stuff actually works. The person in the grocery store giving you the death stare or openly chastising you for not having a mask is the same person who constantly fiddles with theirs, pulls it below their nose when they think no one is looking, and feels fortunate to be able to cram onto a commercial flight with no chance of six inches of social distancing, much less six feet.

For well over a year now, we have been told that we are morally obligated to engage in every manner of government intrusion upon our personal choices for the good of others. We have been told that masks on our faces and distancing were to protect others from getting sick from us, and this idea has been so thoroughly ingrained in our psyche that even those who have been fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 are still employing these (now logically worthless) interventions rather than face the possibility of misunderstanding from the fearful people around them. We were to treat ourselves as a deadly threat to those around us.

Now those who (for whatever reason) have chosen not to receive the fast-tracked, emergency order-allowed COVID-19 vaccines are being similarly guilt-tripped. We are being told that the vaccine is not actually to prevent us from getting sick (in a contrast with every other vaccine in history), it is so we won’t make others sick. Of course, never in the history of modern medicine has it been accepted that a person can pass a sickness onto another without first being sick themselves, and so the government-medical-pharmaceutical establishment continues to rely on the lie of asymptomatic transmission to prop up the lie that the purpose of vaccination is to protect someone other than yourself. The true purpose of vaccination has always been to protect the vaccinated person first. Then they don’t get sick, and they don’t pass it on.

Why is this distinction important? A person’s primary defense system against illness is their own immune system, and a vaccine is designed to train that immune system to defend itself against a known disease. Yes, an unvaccinated person should also receive protection from the vaccinated person infecting them, but this is due to the fact that the vaccinated person doesn’t get sick or infectious. The exact same protection exists for the unvaccinated person when they themselves get the vaccine. There is no need to insist on others getting a vaccine to protect you when you can simply get a vaccine to protect yourself. Yes, vaccines may help protect those who cannot medically tolerate the vaccine themselves, but there must still be a sick person nearby to infect them, and the COVID-19 vaccine is largely unnecessary for those at little risk of developing COVID-19.

Those who have chosen not to get the vaccine – at worst – are putting themselves at risk of disease. Many if not most have already been exposed to the virus and defeated it without a vaccine. They are no more risk to themselves or others than someone who has been vaccinated. If a person can get vaccinated and still be at risk because those around them did not, it’s not a vaccine.

The right answer is for each person to make the decision for themselves and their families. There is plenty of anecdotal and statistical evidence supporting either decision (depending on an individual’s risk profile), but we must not buy the manipulative lie that getting vaccinated is “for others.” This idea – like many others invented specifically for this virus – is brand new and intended to sell conformity and vaccines, not promote health.