Opinion: the Moral Obligation Behind Vaccinations

Unvaccinated people are a breeding ground for mutations

By Jeremy Knight

In the United States, there are far more unvaccinated people than in other countries. I am a Canadian living in Las Vegas. When COVID-19 first hit, the U.S.—despite leadership denying there was a virus—ramped up production and large volumes of vaccines were available early 2021 with first responders and at-risk people getting shots. As a 57-year-old healthy male, I got vaccinated by the end of May. Canada was another story. As a country, we outsourced our drug manufacturing many years ago to India so we had no factories to force production of vaccines. As a result, when I was vaccinated in the U.S., my 82-year-old father had just got his first shot. It was an embarrassment for Canada.

However, now Canada is more vaccinated than the U.S. percentage wise by population. Why? In Canada, for the most part, we are well educated and lack the extreme politically motivated disinformation. However, I don’t want to get into a political debate because both sides don’t listen to reason. There are irrational people in both left wing and right wing camps.  

Before I get to the main issue, let me address the reasons people give for not being vaccinated. There are a small number of people who are total wackos who think that Bill Gates is funding the vaccine to inject microchips into their brains to listen to their thoughts. Luckily, none of my friends fall into this category and besides who needs microchips in your brains when we have Alexa listening to everything we say. Just kidding, Mr. Bezos. We know you turned off that ‘feature’.  The other reasons given fall into either wanting to wait for the FDA to approve the vaccine—this is almost here so these people should fall into line soon, those who think it causes autism or a third arm, or some other fatal condition. In the last six months, according to CDC, 6,490 deaths were reported by physicians, hospitals etc. relating to the vaccine. Of these, only three were directly linked to vaccinations causing deaths by blood clots, which now that we are aware of this issue can be treated. Compare this to 610,000 people who have died of COVID in the last six months in the U.S. alone. You are more likely to get hit by lightning than die from the COVID vaccine. Having a sore arm or a three-day headache is much more common but nothing life threatening or long-term issues.  

By far the biggest reason given is “I am healthy, I am not going to get it and if I do, it’s not going to kill me.” This is the reason I am writing this article. I have no problem with people willing to take the chance and die from COVID if it was a decision that affected only them.

I have a science background and am currently studying biochemistry and capable of understanding the science behind COVID and its variants. To dumb it down from Yale Medicine and CNN, unvaccinated people are a breeding ground for mutations. Anytime a virus replicates there is a chance for a mutation. Think of it like a faulty spell checker.  These mutations might occur 1 in 1,000,000 occurrences, but when you have a large number of people who have not been vaccinated and along with the large number of replication events that occur in the human body of an infected person, the chances of mutations are very common. Mutations alone are not always bad as the human body can recognize the mutated COVID as still being COVID but as more and more mutations occur occasionally the COVID-19 virus changes its form enough that it doesn’t look the same to our immune system. This becomes a new variant.  This is why India with 800 million unvaccinated people was a likely source for the DELTA variant to show up there.

If you are unvaccinated, you are partially responsible for causing the next COVID variant. It is very unlikely it is you but there is a chance it might be. YOU alone could be the source of the Epsilon (the next greek letter after Delta) variant and you alone could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. IS THIS ALONE NOT ENOUGH OF A REASON to play your part towards saving humanity and getting vaccinated? At sometime there may be a variant far more deadly and far more contagious than COVID ever was!

My mother grew up in England during World War II. When the Germans flew over London to bomb the city, everyone (and I mean everyone) turned off their lights, so the bombers could not see where to drop the bombs. It was unfathomable to do otherwise. Imagine if someone back then said “It is my right to turn on my lights, the odds of the bombs hitting me are low. I’ll take my chances” resulting in an entire city getting bombed and millions of deaths.

By not getting vaccinated, you are not making a decision about yourself, you are making a decision about everyone else as well.

So I will end this piece by saying that NOT getting vaccination is a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.  

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