A common excuse for rejecting the amazing miracle of COVID-19 vaccines is, “I don’t want to be a guinea pig.”
Well, here’s the deal. You are a guinea pig. But you have two choices. You can be a guinea pig for the coronavirus or you can be a guinea pig for the vaccines. Let me proffer some data that may be helpful in making your decision.
Choice 1: exposure to COVID-19 and multiple variants with only natural immunity. The odds are you will be exposed to the viruses, and your natural immunity will not prevent them from entering the nuclei of your cells in order to turn them into COVID-19 virus factories to flood every system of your body.
The symptoms you will experience may be mild or deadly, but likely somewhere in between. The “trials” for this choice have been catastrophic: over 598,000 Americans dead, 3.76 million people dead worldwide and millions more injured, some with lasting effects.
Choice 2: you allow a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine inoculation. These vaccines inject no part of the COVID-19 viruses into your body. Instead, chemically replicated pieces of mRNA, encased inside a pod of oily lipids, enter only the cytoplasm of your cells and only last long enough to instruct your cells to manufacture a harmless replica of a piece of the COVID-19 virus protein in order to establish stunning immunity to the real COVID-19 and its variants.
So what are the odds of ill effects from the vaccine? Over 305 million of these vaccines have been injected into the arms of your fellow Americans with, for the most part, mild degrees of temporary discomfort, while at the same time producing well over 90% immunity from all known strains of the COVID-19 virus.
Better yet, if you have been vaccinated, even with the slim chance you will be infected, you will not be hospitalized or die.
In sum, the choice you face is which “guinea pig” track will you take. You will almost certainly encounter the COVID-19 viruses. The question is whether you will experience that encounter with substantial risk of injury or death, or virtually no such risk.
And speaking of the real guinea pigs, if they could think about it, your options would probably be the envy of every one of them.
Richard D. Burbidge
Richard Burbidge is a trial lawyer with over 40 years of trial experience in both Utah and California.