Is it too late to give back my COVID vaccine? I’m joking. Sort of. Even as this Trump-era medical miracle gets transformed before our eyes into a Biden-era pretext for government surveillance and demonization campaigns, I still wouldn’t take back my decision to get vaccinated. But I have to say: there are times when the chuckleheads leading this country are so brazenly corrupt, so spitefully dismissive of the American people’s legitimate concerns, that I wish I could just suck the damn shot out of my arm. 

I decided to get the vaccine about a month ago. I waited that long because I simply did not and do not trust the people in charge. That’s what it comes down to. I think conspiracy theories about microchips are ill-founded and the likelihood of cardiac complications is slim for a young buck like me. If I were a pregnant woman being recklessly shunted down the vaccine assembly line, I would have reason to be more worried. But I’m not. I get a flu shot most years. Left to my own devices, and in the absence of the politics, I probably would have been vaccinated long ago.  

But I was held back by this simple fact: the same smug idiots who lied about the effectiveness of masks, funded research in Wuhan that may have helped create the disease, then lied about that too, then lied about lying, then lied some more, are the people demanding that absolutely everybody get jabbed now, now, now. As usual they are not trying to convince us by reasoning with us transparently like adults. They are instead resorting to their usual tactics of calling us racist, delusional murderers for daring to question their impeccable wisdom and authority. This kind of behavior does not inspire confidence. 

In the end, I did my best to abstract away from the maddening idiocy of our political discourse and asked myself what the most likely medical reality is. The fact that I, a random dudebro who reads old books for a living, was left to muddle through this question using nothing but my own best judgment, is in itself a sign of how desperately broken our knowledge-producing systems are. In a healthy America there would be actual experts, and you could rely on them to tell you actual facts, and then you would use those facts to make your actual own decision as is your absolute prerogative. But we do not live in that world. Ah, well. Google it is. 

The conclusion I came to is one about which relatively level-headed scientists seem, from what I can tell, to agree: COVID is going to be around for a long time, probably our whole lives. We are basically all going to get it at some point. Vaccines will make most cases less severe, but the virus will mutate, and there will probably be booster shots to cope with that. You know, like the flu. This is how respiratory illnesses work. Whatever farces and catastrophes may come politically in the next few years, the Miracle Trump Vaccine is probably going to be a part of life. So I headed over to a Walgreens and pulled the trigger. 

No sooner did I make this decision than the patented COVID totalitarianism machine kicked into absolute hyperdrive. Perhaps to distract from Joe Biden’s total disintegration into a stammering puddle of failure, perhaps in a desperate bid to save California Governor Gavin Newsom from recall, perhaps to bury the memory of Andrew Cuomo’s sleazy fall from grace in New York, Democrat leaders and their allies began pushing absolutely deranged measures onto their already beleaguered subjects.  

Mask mandates for the vaccinated, including outdoors—where your risk of catching COVID is effectively zero. Vaccine passports for indoor activity in major metropolitan areas, plus pressure on businesses in other locations to enforce their own miniature inoculation regime. And worst of all: the potential for a truly sinister nationwide network of QR-code verification. That sounds like something that would definitely never morph into a horrific dystopian nightmare extending far beyond its original intended purpose, no way, uh-uh, not gonna happen. 

Unlike some, I did not cherish illusions that vaccination would put an end to this kind of effrontery, which has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with power. I hope it goes without saying that my decision to get vaccinated in no way means I have anything but disgust for the oppressive tactics of our useless ruling class. I have never shown my records of vaccination to get into a restaurant, nor will I ever do so. Any store that makes such an invasive request of me will lose my business for good. I made my decision by my own lights, for my own reasons, as is every American’s God-given right—whether that means getting vaccinated against COVID, or not. 

But here’s the thing: I don’t think my deliberative process is unique or even rare. Vaccine hesitancy isn’t ultimately a political thing, or an intelligence thing, or a race thing, whatever demographic differences may be emerging along those lines. In essence, the wait-and-see approach is a perfectly reasonable response to more than a year of gaslighting, misinformation, and despotism from official sources.  

Lots of us raised our eyebrows at first, then thought about it, then were coming around. But if you’re anything like me, you have now been hounded into vaccine remorse by the same worthless midwits who made you skeptical in the first place. If they would just leave us alone, we’d probably drift in the direction of making the right decisions for ourselves and our families. But they won’t leave us alone, because their entire reason for being is to make absolutely everything spectacularly worse by handling it as arrogantly and as stupidly as possible. So here we are.