Re: "Wake me up when September ends," opinion, Sept. 9, Airdrie City View
Dear editor,
The sentiment in the recent column, "Wake me up when September ends," quite honestly appealed to me, but having the media and others persistently pronouncing judgment on people who have chosen not to be vaccinated in the past few months has prompted me to respond to the article.
The references to the unvaccinated as being those who "made the conscious decision not to listen to medical experts," or are "privileged enough to refuse the jab" are not how I have experienced the unvaccinated.
In spite of being continually and unkindly labelled as an uneducated, unthinking, uncaring, self-centered, and probably rural (as if that were a negative quality) demographic, the people I know who have not received the vaccines yet are folks who have chosen to wait for more long-term scientific evidence before accepting an unknown gene-therapy injection into their bodies. Some share prior negative and regrettable personal experiences.
They are invested in learning, have read extensively, and are far more willing to listen to the medical experts than the media give them credit for. They just want to hear all of them uncensored, including the ones who are being discredited, de-platformed, or fired for speaking out about their concerns regarding vaccines. As one of these brave immunologists/vaccinologists from Ontario said, "I don't recognize the country I was born in."
The unvaccinated people that I know are highly educated and work in respected backgrounds, including a civil engineer, a biologist, a chartered accountant, a teacher, a pilot, an occupational therapist, a respiratory therapist, a physician, a pharmacist and multiple nurses. The list goes on.
Unvaccinated people are beyond baffled when medical doctors who have seen increasingly encouraging success in prevention and early treatment of COVID-19 (with promising interventions) are being silenced at a time when vaccines are being seen to disappoint, and boosters recommended. An unknown number of boosters, I would add.
While we sometimes can be unduly influenced by social media and other media, we can rest assured that none of us are likely to change our position by being shamed, coerced or even bribed by the government on something which, once done, can never be undone. Rather, we can all remain humble and realize that none of us knows everything.
Years from now, as in the case of the residential school tragedy, we will be viewed in retrospect and judged by our grandchildren as to whether we acted appropriately. We may have been on the right side of this, or maybe not. But let them at least know we were kind.
