With variants closing in and rewriting everything I thought I knew about keeping myself safe, COVID’s known dangers, especially for me, outweighed any unknown vaccine risks. My heart sunk at the prospect of more pandemic-induced decision fatigue. She confirmed the lack of long-term data. My conversation with my rheumatologist didn’t vanquish my uncertainty, as I’d hoped. Six weeks later, I took my first COVID-19 vaccine dose. I wrote that I planned to wait several months to the boyfriend of a United Kingdom health care worker, who sought information for her. Community spaces can be a vaccine for COVID loneliness. I listened and shared trusted information sources, suggesting they consult their doctors.ĭeaths of despair: Isolation kills, especially seniors. I felt the weight of their life-altering vaccine decisions, not as an “expert” but as a fellow traveler with my own questions and anxieties. Since mid-December, I’ve fielded questions from people in health care and law enforcement with autoimmune diseases who solicited my advice after reading a vaccine safety feature in which I discussed my condition. Questions remain about short- and long-term vaccine reactions, with misinformation adding to the fear, setting us on a roller coaster of tough choices with no clear answers. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we may receive mRNA COVID-19 vaccines but no data currently exist on their safety for us. My body attacked healthy tissue, resulting in a systemic autoimmune disease, Sjogren’s, that causes me dry eyes and mouth, crushing fatigue, chronic pain and inflammation.įor people with autoimmune diseases, which remain poorly understood, the vaccination decision doesn’t come lightly. At some point in my early life a bacterial or viral infection, perhaps childhood chickenpox or roseola infections, triggered a faulty immune response. For years, I avoided flu shots due to my uncertainty about my immune system’s reaction. Watch Video: How the new RNA technology is used to create the COVID-19 vaccinesĪs someone whose immune system confounds me, I thought I’d wait longer to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
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