I’m high risk, I am immune compromised, I take medicine twice a day everyday to prevent me from making enough white blood cells amongst other effects, I had a double lung transplant in 2014. The problem with disallowing the public to be vaccinated overlooks a critical piece of information, immune suppression makes vaccines less effective. While a vaccine may give a healthy person a 95% protection rate (being simplistic and just plugging in numbers here) but if you give me that same vaccine my immune system will react far less to that vaccine giving me significantly less protection. I rely on those around me being vaccinated and their high vaccine efficacy to make up for the fact vaccines are less effective for me, and anyone else who is high risk also relies on this. Herd immunity is critical for at risk populations because we can never achieve equal protection rates as able bodied people. It’s vitally important those around me do not catch and spread illness, their illness is a direct threat to me. Allowing me to be vaccinated is absolutely essential but I will still have significantly less protection once those around me are prevented from being vaccinated.
This is dangerous in so many ways and even the way it seems to be less dangerous really isn’t especially helpful. I actually have bad reactions to the covid vaccine, it messes up my menses for months, it makes my eyes bleed, I had body wide inflammation including acute pancreatitis and lymphedema of the cervix… so no matter what I do I’m in danger, I can wildly disregulate my already fucked up body and immune system in painful and dangerous ways or I can not vaccinate and risk Covid killing me. I still mask up and try to social distance and all that and am treated like a pariah for it, I was really looking forward to having a normal life once I had my bilateral lung transplant but it looks like I will always have to be an obviously disabled person who the world is actively trying to leave behind/ignore/kill
I’m high risk, I am immune compromised, I take medicine twice a day everyday to prevent me from making enough white blood cells amongst other effects, I had a double lung transplant in 2014. The problem with disallowing the public to be vaccinated overlooks a critical piece of information, immune suppression makes vaccines less effective. While a vaccine may give a healthy person a 95% protection rate (being simplistic and just plugging in numbers here) but if you give me that same vaccine my immune system will react far less to that vaccine giving me significantly less protection. I rely on those around me being vaccinated and their high vaccine efficacy to make up for the fact vaccines are less effective for me, and anyone else who is high risk also relies on this. Herd immunity is critical for at risk populations because we can never achieve equal protection rates as able bodied people. It’s vitally important those around me do not catch and spread illness, their illness is a direct threat to me. Allowing me to be vaccinated is absolutely essential but I will still have significantly less protection once those around me are prevented from being vaccinated.
This is dangerous in so many ways and even the way it seems to be less dangerous really isn’t especially helpful. I actually have bad reactions to the covid vaccine, it messes up my menses for months, it makes my eyes bleed, I had body wide inflammation including acute pancreatitis and lymphedema of the cervix… so no matter what I do I’m in danger, I can wildly disregulate my already fucked up body and immune system in painful and dangerous ways or I can not vaccinate and risk Covid killing me. I still mask up and try to social distance and all that and am treated like a pariah for it, I was really looking forward to having a normal life once I had my bilateral lung transplant but it looks like I will always have to be an obviously disabled person who the world is actively trying to leave behind/ignore/kill