Boosted But Sleepy

That booster shot... was something else.

I was at Buona Vista CC bright and early this morning, way ahead of the appointment time of eight. The stations weren't manned, and the signs were not really set up either. Eventually everything would be ready, and I just waited patiently for it.

Registration proceeded painlessly. The booster shot mRNA-1273 used a much lower amount compared to a regular vaccine dose (250 μL versus 500 μL), and the protocols seemed to be updated to require only 15 min of observation time as compared to 30 min. There were quite a few others who were present for their booster shots as well, but everything went smooth.

The injection site is a bit sore as per the usual intramuscular injections, but was generally un-notable. I did end up sleeping the whole day though, and supplementing myself with more food than usual.

And that's about it. Go get your damn booster shots if you are offered it---this is especially the case when they are heavily subsidised by your government in their overall management of the pandemic. That potential few days of impairment from side effects of the booster shot is nothing as compared to becoming yet another vector of infection for COVID-19, especially if one is living with or has close contact with people from the more vulnerable demographics.

And for those who have not even gotten their basic vaccination series for COVID-19 for no other reason than willful disobedience, fuck you and the horse you came on. You've had two years to observe how the pandemic has spread, and how the vaccines have protected people from death and the vulnerable from infection (the vulnerable's constitution isn't strong enough to fully recover from the infection). There is no excuse to not take the damn vaccine at this stage. And don't quote random verses from the Bible to protect your indefensible position, and don't even bother quoting whatever constitutional law that claims that your freedom of expression or whatever is being violated---the pandemic is not a conspiracy limited to only your country; it is happening world wide. No single national government in the world has that level of influence to create a national level conspiracy that seems to be global, and no group of national governments are competent enough to synchronise their conspiracies to such a degree that they are coherent, so get off your stupidity horse and start listening to medical experts for once.

Don't get me wrong, it's not the stubbon unvaccinated that I am trying to save here with my righteous anger---it's for those vulnerable who are medically unable to take the vaccinations or benefit from the vaccinations that I am trying to save here. Whenever there's a pool of people where the virus is allowed to proliferate, the overall likelihood of a new mutation that can evade whatever defenses we created via vaccination goes up geometrically. The more people are vaccinated, the less likely we have large pools of people from which the virus can pass on useful mutations across the different mutation groups. And the less likely we have useful mutations being passed along, the faster we can wind up this pandemic with an overall win for humanity.

That initial burn of COVID-19 has already passed---we are now in the tail-end management phase of the pandemic. This is likely to be long drawn as we strike ever deeper into harder and harder to reach populations to train their immune systems to fight off the virus faster. For reference, small pox took ten years of constant effort to eradicate complete. COVID-19 isn't going to be eradicated in ten years... especially not with this kind of ``vaccine hesitancy'' nonsense. In the mean time, death will still happen due to a failed fight against the infection, and there will always be those who are maimed badly from a prolonged fight without the pre-emptive training of the immune system via vaccination.

But I suppose those who do read my blog aren't completely dumb enough to fall into that category of people, right?