Will you take up the sword?

 

There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. John 15:13

My daughter is a unicorn. She is diagnosed with a rare disease, moyamoya disease, said to impact fewer than 1 in 100,000 people in the United States. Within her rare disease group, she is in a smaller subset of patients who have had a surgical failure. Within that group, she is in an even smaller group to have received a rescue surgery known as the omental bypass to the brain. Within the omental bypass group, she is the only known patient to develop a granuloma (tissue mass) within her omental bypass.

My daughter sees a total of eight specialists affiliated with five hospital systems in Virginia, California, and the District of Columbia. The difficulty with managing care across a geographically dispersed team is achieving cross-specialty collaboration and team consensus. In a normal setting this is challenging. With the backdrop of COVID (overflowing emergency rooms, reduced staffing, pressured medical professionals, limitations on non-emergent but critical services, delays in testing), this has been almost impossible.

The vaccine brought a huge sense of relief.  As part of the most vulnerable population, it not only offered our daughter a chance for increased protection, but it meant a return to medical business as usual. As vaccinations picked up, cases began dropping; hospital beds, emptying; appointments increased; non-emergent services reopened. And then vaccinations stalled. Delta took hold. ERs filled up again. Our relief quickly turned to frustration.

If you are still on the fence about getting a vaccination (and not precluded from taking the vaccination for health reasons), I am asking you to read a little further. The truth is, while I do not fully understand your hesitancy, I do not want to be dismissive of your concerns. There have been more than 338 million vaccinations distributed in the United States to date. Historically complications from vaccinations develop within the first two months of administration. We are eight months into emergency authorization. The data overwhelmingly supports there is a lower risk of developing a serious complication from taking a vaccination than from contracting COVID.

I am not here to persuade you to get a COVID vaccination based on a risk argument, however. Statistics do not protect us; they only comfort us. If you are the person who falls on the wrong side of a statistic, the data means nothing. What I want you to understand is your decision not to vaccinate has tertiary impacts; those impacts cause harm to others. As long as large numbers of people remain unvaccinated, the medical system will remain overwhelmed; critical resources needed by other patient groups (rare disease groups, cardiac patients, cancer patients, diabetes patients, etc.) will get diverted; new variants will develop that are more virulent, more contagious, and resistant to the current vaccinations. In the face of a large population of unvaccinated, the country remains vulnerable to resurgence.

I come from a military family. My grandfather, father, husband, and son-in-law all served in combat. They and soldiers like them, unhesitatingly, took on risk to ensure the safety of others. We are in a war against this virus. Vaccinations are our most effective weapons. We need more soldiers. Will you take up the sword?