I'll be okay without the covid vaccine

The latest topic that I’ve been constantly thinking about that relates to biology is the covid-19 vaccine. I am aware this is a sensitive subject to many and know this post is basically public, but this is what we are all facing at the moment. Personally speaking, I am a fully recovered person from the virus itself and know there are many of us not just in San Diego but the entire world. A few months back, I was talking to a coworker that is currently shadowing as a nurse practitioner at a hospital. She was telling me as firsthand facts that she starting to see a rise in covid patients hospitalized and they had all received both doses of the vaccine. These were the three vaccines that were made available to the public. Months later to today, the health care facility where I work, we’ve been seeing a rise in covid-19 hospitalizations. It is nowhere near the hospitalizations like there was during the winter, but that is what everyone is in walking fear of. These hospitalizations are patients that are fully vaccinated with the new covid shot and unvaccinated.

I am not a medical doctor, virologist or epidemiologist, but I do know that viruses mutate. A vaccine would build some immunity against a virus but a person that has had recovered from the virus will also have some immunity if exposed again from the same or new strand. What I don’t understand is that the people that have been fully recovered and did not get the vaccine are not given any credit whatsoever. On the contrary, they are being shamed or pressured to still get it by employers, schools, the news, and society. Health care workers and patients are being exploited with these vaccines that are basically proving that they don’t fully work. The FDA has not approved them, but they are allowed to be administered by emergency use without the people knowing the long-term side effects from them.

What interested me most in this class was genes and gene therapy because it showed a glimpse of how vaccines are made and how they are supposed to work. Modified DNA is injected into a vector to create new gene stimulating the immune system. I believe that is how these vaccines are supposed to work like the flu vaccine. I personally get it every year and once flu season is over, we are told that it was 60% effective; for example. It makes me wonder what my immune system would do without them instead of putting foreign substances in my body every year.