Statistically speaking, the novel coronavirus is orders of magnitude more likely to kill me than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is to give me the rare blood clots. Now, either outcome is extremely unlikely, of course.
Given these two competing and minor risks, I elected to get the single jab of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for many reasons. Mostly: I simply trust a vaccine made by American capitalists more than I do a virus likely made in a Chinese lab.
Under the terms of Operation Warp Speed, any of the three approved coronavirus vaccines have been made to Americans free of charge, and a silver lining of being last in line thanks to my age and health, my shot required three minutes in a curbside booth at a local pharmacy. Thus, my only consideration for getting the vaccine was on the merits of its utility, not any logistical consideration. And the utility was clear to me: as a part of the gain of function experiments on novel coronaviruses that the U.S. State Department had previously warned were risky, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was intentionally biohacking coronaviruses to be as contagious and fatal as possible. Even if I am not at any real risk of death from current iterations of COVID-19, the virus could continue to mutate to prove even more fatal and contagious, past the point of the vaccine’s protections, if we do not reach requisite herd immunity soon enough.
So, without fear or hesitation, I finally got my Johnson & Johnson jab just as Washington, D.C., is opening our vaccine dispersal to all above 16-years-old. Statistically speaking, car rides, such as the Uber I took to get my shot, are significantly more likely to kill me in a given year than this shot is to land me in the hospital. And more importantly, this shot will, however marginally, reduce the odds of the coronavirus mutating into something that actually could conceivably kill me or bypass the protection of the vaccine for more vulnerable folks. It is this point where the establishment rejection of the lab leak hypothesis is especially dangerous to our campaign to maximize shots in arms.
We don’t even have to entertain the more outlandish notion that the Chinese Communist Party was creating new coronaviruses as intentional bioweapons. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that SARS-Cov-2 was specifically designed to be more fatal and catching as a pure experiment. Chinese virologists could have been studying how to innoculate ourselves against the next pandemic when they accidentally let loose a plague upon the world. This is easier to believe than the claim that the virus whose parent emerged more than a thousand miles from Wuhan just happened to show up in a wet market that didn’t even sell bats? Even when it just so conveniently happened to emerge in the same city as China’s only BSL-4 laboratory, one that American intelligence had already warned was riskily biohacking coronaviruses, including the one from Yunnan with a 96% genetic similarity to the virus plaguing us all today? Fat freaking chance.
So taking the vaccine was an easy call. In any objective measure, it was wildly convenient and obviously safer than the alternative, and that is true for you too.
