EDITOR’S NOTE: Julie Mack is a retired journalist, most recently working for MLive, focusing mostly on Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. She posted this on Facebook this week:
by Julie Mack
Now that I’m retired, I’ve been musing about the key takeaways from my past 15 months of reporting on the Coronavirus.
Perhaps the biggest is this: COVID-19 has created the world’s biggest public health crisis in more than a century. But the vaccines are the pandemic’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project: A breathtaking scientific achievement in both speed and scope.
COVID-19 is now largely a preventable disease. The vaccines are safe and effective. The data is abundantly, overwhelming clear that the risks posed by COVID-19 far, far, far outweigh the risks of getting vaccinated.
That 40% of people who qualify for vaccines have yet to be inoculated is totally baffling to me. Just in Michigan alone, there are hundreds of people still hospitalized every week and dozens who die of COVID-19, not to mention the hundreds newly diagnosed each week with the virus who risk long-haul COVID, a syndrome that can impact about one of five people with the virus.
(Think about this: You haven’t heard about ERs filling up with people having reactions to the shots.)
If you haven’t been vaccinated, go to the nearest pharmacy and get it done. Don’t be among those end up seriously ill, wishing that you hadn’t put it off.
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