🖊 “Dear Vaccine”
by Naomi Shihab Nye.
(...) We liked our lives. Maybe we didn’t thank them enough. Being able to cross streets with people we didn’t know, pressing elevator buttons, smiling at strangers, standing in line to pay. We liked standing in line more than we pretended. (...)
Global Vaccine Poem project.
⚠️ Stark warnings everywhere
I don’t think I need to go on about this. Suffice it to say that the pandemic is bad and getting worse. Kai Kupferschmidt, a writer at Science Magazine, made the point that if the individual risk for healthy, vaccinated people is low, the risk to our communities (local, national, global) is extremely high. The gap between the strong and the vulnerable is growing, as is the gap between countries that have access to jabs and countries that don’t. Hospitals will overflow again and we should expect strict measures. Again. Click through for the whole thread:
How to use this: please. Please, please, please. Please take care — not only of Covid, but also of breaking a leg, or needing stitches, or requiring hospital care in any way. Act as if health systems will collapse again (because they very well may do so). Christmas isn’t worth a life, let alone a thousand.
💉 A shot against cancer
A vaccine against cancer. The absolute dream. Can you imagine being able to inoculate yourself and your children against this ravaging illness?
Lucky for us, such a vaccine has been around for 15 years. We know it is safe and 90% effective at preventing six types of fatal cancers. It works best when administered in childhood. It’s amazing. Here-are-all-our-arms-shoot-us-up-right-TF-now amazing.
The Human papillomavirus (HPV) is wildly, and I mean WILDLY contagious. By age 50, 80% of female humans will have been infected — those of us with vaginas are more systematically screened for it, but we can infer that the proportion of males exposed is equally as high. This is a dizzying number. If you were 11 years old or older in 2006, I’m just going to assume that you have — or have had — HPV. Feel free to assume the same of me. That’s how prevalent it is.
It is sexually transmitted. Whilst condoms work a charm against a tonne of STIs, they’re pretty shit at stopping HPV. Not to get too graphic, but you don’t need vaginal or anal penetration to get infected. Oral sex and external contact are enough. So even if you think of yourself as a virgin but you’ve dabbled in heavy petting, you’ve probably been exposed (if you’re a teenager, lesson learned — it’s ALL SEX, baby).
HPV causes genital warts. More frighteningly, it causes cancer of the vulva, vagina, cervix, penis, anus, and throat. This concerns people of all genders. Contrary to popular belief, HPV is an equal-opportunity pathogen.
Two weeks ago, The Lancet published a years-long study from England1 on the effect of an early version of the vaccine, which acts against two variants of the virus. It shows that there were 87% fewer HPV-related cancers in the first generation of children who received this shot compared with previous generations. You think that’s good? Wait until I tell you that the updated shot now protects against 9 cancer-inducing variants of HPV.
Here’s the catch: it is a vaccine AND it requires grown-ups to accept that our kids will soon become sexually active. The overwhelming majority of us like to live in denial about our little ones. Plus we can’t seem to get over vax hesitancy, even for Covid. HPV vaccine hesitancy was 49.6% in the United States at its lowest, in 2012. Three years ago, about 64% of parents in this country said they don’t intend to protect their kids against HPV. It gets worse: for parents of girls, that number reached nearly 70%.
So what are the arguments?
My babies don’t need it, they’re not having sex.
I should hope they’re not. Assuming the kid isn’t one of the 10% being sexually abused (let’s get comfortable with that reality), you’d better make sure that you inoculate them before they’re sexually active, and therefore exposed to HPV.
Did you know that more than half of 15-year-olds are having sex? Once more for those in the back: oral sex and anal sex are sex (as is rubbing, etc.).
Besides, there’s another good reason to do it early: before 15, you need only two shots. After 15, you need three.
We don’t know enough.
It’s been 15 years. We know enough. Between 2015 and 2018, the proportion of adverse events related to the newer HPV vaccine actually dropped. The chance of any serious adverse event is currently at 0.0018%.
Boys don’t need it.
If you’re one of those who forgets to care about vulva-having people because you didn’t make one, let us remind you: penile cancer. Throat cancer. Anal cancer. That’s what too many phallus owners are still getting from HPV. Do we really want to expose them to that?
But… long-term consequences!
Again, it’s been 15 years. Even with the newer version launched in 2015, 135 million doses have been administered. That’s a helluvah Phase 4 trial (jk, we’ve long been out of Phase 4). And no, it doesn’t cause infertility.
How to use this: let me tell you about this family — Emma and Mark, and their kids Jack, Isabel, and Victoria (NOT real names) — who said they would wait to give the children their Covid shots. Emma and Mark said the babes didn’t need them. The day after the shots were approved by the Centers for Disease Control, other excited parents began to exchange in person and in group texts info about local vax sites with paediatric doses, stories about long queues, what forms guardian consent could take per NYC rules, details about side effects, etc. Five days later, Jack, Isabel, and Victoria were the only ones in their respective circles still unvaccinated. So what did Emma and Mark do? They got their kids jabbed.
Social pressure works. The environment in which we live matters, and we each contribute to shaping it.
So if you have children 9 years old and older, get them their HPV shots and let people know. If you are not a parent but have kids in your life whom you love, don’t hesitate to talk about it (kindly). Be intentional about shaping your environment.
📜 Vax poetry
I wanted to share this lovely project that allows you to declare, in verse, your love for vaccines.
How to use this: click through, feel inspired, scroll down, pick a prompt and write your poem.
where they excel at counting everything — shoutout to English statisticians without whom I’d have not had anything to write about in this pandemic.