I'm grateful to be unvaccinated

A normal life, still lived normally

There is a druid-like ritual in our society now that whenever someone catches COVID they must pronounce themselves “grateful” or “thankful” to have received the COVID vaccine, because otherwise without it their eyeballs would be bursting and their skin would be melting from their molten-hot bones, I guess. Here is the CEO of Pfizer, for instance, expressing deep gratitude for having been injected with his company serum four times:

Albert Bourla @AlbertBourla

I would like to let you know that I have tested positive for #COVID19. I am thankful to have received four doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and I am feeling well while experiencing very mild symptoms. I am isolating and have started a course of Paxlovid.

Boy, it seems like—and I’m no scientist here, so I could be wrong—but it seems like if you get stuck with a “vaccine” four times, you still get the virus, and you also opt to undertake a course of antiviral medication, maybe, just maybe, your “vaccine” is the functional equivalent of a dog turd and it doesn’t really do much of any real value.

Well, whatever. If you want to get “vaccinated” against COVID-19 and be grateful when you get it anyway, that’s your bailiwick. For my part, I am extraordinarily grateful to not be vaccinated. It’s a fantastic feeling.

There are people—many millions of people—who treated the vaccine quite literally like the Second Coming of Christ and who could thus probably never comprehend the joy it feels to have never gotten it. And in a sense I understand that inability. If in the spring of 2020 you pretty much re-oriented your whole entire life to revolve around the development of a single pharmaceutical—if you made the choice to functionally freeze your life in place until you were injected with a hastily developed medicine both the short- and long-term effects of which you had absolutely no knowledge—then I guess getting the vaccine was, like, one of the defining moments of your life, and you’d understandably feel grateful for it.

Things didn’t go that way for me. It was obvious very quickly that COVID-19 was, for the vast majority of people, an unserious and unworrisome disease. By late April of 2020 it was really very clear that, if you were healthy—and especially if you were under 60 and healthy, but really even if you were over 60 too—there was pretty much nothing to worry about from COVID. All you had to do was read the readily accessible data, posted on pretty much every public health authority website in the entire world, to see it. It was all right there, inarguable and incontestable.

Not succumbing to the hysteria felt good. You could see what the hysteria itself was doing to people: They were terrified of human interaction, they abandoned all of their pleasurable pursuits, they taught themselves to hate and despise all of the normal indicators of healthy human society such as groups of people and crowded shopping districts and warmly chattering restaurants and quietly bustling libraries. Millions of people decided overnight that the most important metric by which to orient their lives was not whether they were happy, fulfilled, healthy people living in fully actualized societies, but rather whether or not Anthony Fauci told them it was okay to get within 72 inches of another person.

So of course, amid all of this, the vaccine was for so many people a savior of sorts, a denuder of perdition and for countless people literally the only thing to really look forward to in their lives.

For me and for a relatively small handful of other people, that wasn’t the case, because we hadn’t lost our minds overnight and upended our entire worldviews to fall in line with public panic. It will probably never be possible to fully communicate what it felt like in the earliest days of the pandemic, to see the whole world going clinically insane over a virus with what even then we knew was a 99% rate of survivability. To keep your head in those times was a notable thing—it was not hard to do, exactly, but it was nevertheless distinct and notable if you did it. There were not many of us.

Not getting the vaccine is simply an extension of the decision to not succumb to wholesale mental panic. Nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily explain why I should get injected with a largely untested and completely novel pharmaceutical with unknown short- and long-term effects, one that doesn’t stop either infection or transmission of the virus it’s meant to counteract, and where the virus in question is one I have a statistically minuscule chance of getting seriously ill from, let alone dying from it. If someone can make this cost-benefit analysis work for me, maybe I’ll consider it. But they can’t and so I wont.

So yes, I am grateful to not be vaccinated. It means I’m still able to think clearly and rationally and comprehensively about complex topics; it means I didn’t go nuts and abandon what little intellect I possess in favor of CDC press releases. Of course, if you got the vaccine, it doesn’t necessarily mean you did do that; there are a small but notable number of reasons it may have made sense for you to get the jab. But arguably for most people there was very little reason to do it, and if you’re one of the ones who made that choice, you have every reason to feel grateful for it.