Vaccination - Yes or No

[Mortblanc]

SD when you are 40 and healthy you can be all macho and brave and depend on your healthy immune system.

When you are 70, survivor of two heart attacks, with type 2 diabetes, you have some realizations to face.

One of them is that for each year you survive your chances of surviving the next year are even less. Here in the states 98% of the deaths from CV have come from the 70+ age group.

I truly feel that I have not yet survived the CV plague, I have just survived so far.

Another realization I have come too during this experience is that I do not have control of who and what comes near me, not really. Systems still break down and necessitate repair that outside people must do, neighbors still walk up on my blind side while I am tending the garden, shipments still come in (from of all places CHINA), and the post man still brings me junk mail from contaminated sources.

There is also the need to leave my sanctuary and find items needed for the repairs I do myself but could never have anticipated a need for that particular washer that was left out of the repair kit that I did have. Eventually you have to go out.

As has been pointed out, this virus is here to stay. I am quite sure that I have already been exposed to it and fought it off. So far-so good, but how long will my aging immune system triumph over this eternal threat?

That brings up realization number 3. How long do I want to live?

At one time my goal was 60. Then the goal was 70. Do I now press the reset button in the middle of a pandemic and shoot for the age where there is a 99% chance of fatality?

My criteria for taking the vaccine? It has to have a fatality rate less than the CV itself for people in my age group.

So far, in spite of the huge numbers brandished about, the U.S. infection rate for the entire duration is less than 2%. Of that 2% the fatality rate is 5%.

Not %5 of the total population, just 5% of the 2% that caught the disease. This is the kind of place where the media distorts the numbers. the numbers are huge because the population is huge, the percentages tell a different story.

(Alcohol related causes account for 2.6% of our death rate ,about the same for you folks, and you can still advertise and sell alcohol legally, and people still drink it.)

And my doctor tells me that there are people that have massive heart attacks and refuse to take their meds, and people with type 2 diabetes that still eat ice cream and candy bars.

They simply do not want to believe they are sick, or different from anyone else. It is totally psychological, and it kills them.

As for me, if they come up with an effective and relatively safe vaccine I will take it.