Voting for freedom from COVID-19

I’m responding today to a column in Tuesday’s Kearney Hub by State Sen. Tom Brewer, who disagrees with the Department of Defense’s mandate requiring members of the National Guard to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Brewer — a decorated military veteran whose district spreads from Broken Bow to Crawford — avoids mentioning COVID-19 by name in his column, but I assume that’s what he’s referring to when he writes that “the vaccines the military has ordered its members to take … do not prevent infection. They do not stop a person from spreading the virus. They do not moderate the symptoms of infection, and they have caused countless deaths and injuries in otherwise young, healthy people.”

I assume he’s not rallying against vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox or the flu, which Americans receive routinely without complaint.

Too bad the COVID vaccine became a political hot potato. I wish Brewer could have shadowed me as I covered COVID-19 in the Kearney area for the last (nearly) three years.

He’d have seen COVID-19 patients rolling into hospitals like waves on the beach and overwhelming doctors and nurses. He’d have seen how hospitals hastily created separate COVID-19 wards to keep contagious patients away from other patients.

He’d have seen EMS crews package themselves inside personal protective equipment like Fed Ex parcels before hurrying a deteriorating COVID patient to the hospital.

He’d have heard frustrated doctors talk about patients who pooh-poohed vaccinations until they lay in an ICU bed with COVID, begging for a shot. By then, it was too late.

He’d have read the Two Rivers Public Health Department’s daily tallies of COVID patients and seen the frantic scramble of Two Rivers staffers calling people who had been exposed to the disease, advising them to isolate. Some people hung up on them.

He’d have seen how Two Rivers beefed up its staff and worked seven days a week to keep up with COVID. As a journalist, I did, too.

He’d have listened to interviews with people who survived COVID, people who constructed walls at home to separate COVID-infected family members from vulnerable grandparents. He’d have heard the grieving woman who couldn’t sit with her mother as she died from COVID because nursing homes and ICUs were locked to outsiders.

He’d have heard about the person still unable to work months after supposedly recovering from COVID.

He’d have heard a woman mourn her fiance, a photographer who got COVID while shooting a wedding and died five weeks later.

He’d have heard about the young woman who isolated in her bedroom after getting COVID from a co-worker. Her mother set her meals on a tray outside her bedroom door.

He’d have heard stories about COVID at Lexington’s packing plant and its 50% infection rate. COVID flowed like blood through the plant, but they had to come to work because they needed their paychecks.

Only after the vaccine became available early in 2021 did that furor recede, yet some people balked at vaccinations. No wonder the delta variant stormed in during fall 2021.

In his column, Brewer said the vaccine was produced “too fast.” True, it came out far ahead of the 10 years or so normally required for vaccine production, but there wasn’t time for that. The vaccine worked.

We’ve required shots for kids to enter schools for decades. When the Salk and Sabin oral vaccines came out, people (including me) lined up in school gymnasiums and swallowed or got poked and were grateful for the protection. I also remember parents in California and New York who, several years ago, decided that kids didn’t need polio shots anymore. Guess what? Polio woke up and came back to life.

So much fuss over a quick prick that will stop a virus that could zip through the National Guard and bring it to a temporary halt. I shake my head. Brewer said he’s fighting for “freedom.” So am I. Freedom from COVID. Keep the National Guard troops healthy, so they can keep us safe from the harm for which there are no vaccines.