I can’t say I was surprised, but it didn’t take long for readers to jump at the bait last week when I wrote that for the first time, I had tested positive for COVID-19 despite having been regularly vaccinated throughout the pandemic.
“Vaccines are poison,” wrote one reader, who said I’d fallen for a hoax. “Wake up!”
Actually, as I said last week, I wasn’t sure I was awake. I thought I might be having a COVID-induced nightmare as I watched anti-vax Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fire experts, dismantle his department, destroy morale, derail millions of dollars in vaccine research and then bark and bicker with senators about it.
It turned out my eyes were wide open the whole time.
Despite testing positive, another reader scolded, I “continue to vilify vaccine skeptics generally, and … Kennedy specifically. Truly fascinating.”
Even more fascinating is that with nothing but half-baked theories and no medical credentials, Kennedy was handed the most important job in American medicine.
“Just ask yourself WHY Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and Joe Biden and Jill Biden, along with Anthony Fauci ALL GOT the Vaccines and the boosters and they ALL got COVID-19!” asked another reader.
No. I’m not going to ask myself WHY.
“Lopez got a booster before his travels and then got COVID. What does that tell us?” asked yet another reader. “It warns us of the ineffectiveness of the vaccine and Lopez’s misleading propaganda.”
Look, I get it. It’s hard to snuff out misinformation when the nation’s health services administration specializes in it. Kennedy’s Ministry of Hacks and Quacks has claimed there is “no clinical data” supporting COVID vaccines and said anyone can get them, despite an outcry that the new restrictions are making them unavailable, more expensive or difficult to get.
Look, it’s one thing to willingly give up the U.S. role as world leader in science, environmental protection and biomedical research, but let’s put on our thinking caps for a moment before surrendering what’s left of common sense.
Like RFK Jr., I’m no doctor. But my understanding is that when the COVID vaccines were first developed — and President Trump took bows, by the way — they were not sold as cures. They were a way to help control the spread of the virus, reduce severity and save lives.
Does anyone remember that in the early days of COVID, before the vaccines were available, people were horribly sick, and that we were on our way to more than 1 million deaths in the U.S. and 7 million worldwide?
Some people built temporary immunity by surviving COVID. Others were protected by vaccines. The tide turned, and today, even with this latest COVID strain, hospitalizations and deaths are relatively rare.
When I got vaccinated a month ago, here was my thinking:
It had been 10 months since my last vaccination and I was about to travel cross-country, increasing my exposure. I knew we were a month out from a new vaccine that would be a better weapon against the latest variant, but I opted for the existing vaccine, knowing that some protection is better than none.
As I write, I’ve just tested negative after 12 days. My symptoms were relatively mild overall, and Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco, told me I might well have been much sicker if I hadn’t been vaccinated a month ago and previously.
Readers had a different takeaway, I told him. They said my infection was proof the vaccines don’t work.
“That’s a very unfortunate interpretation,” he said, given the actual science of how and why the vaccines work. “The people I’m seeing in the hospital now are people who didn’t get vaccinated.”
Chin-Hong said confusion about the vaccine and concerns about side effects are “understandable” because of “all the talk coming out of Washington, D.C., and the assault on vaccines in general.”
But he said he tells people “we’ve had vaccines for many decades, they’re one of the greatest advances in modern medicine, and it’s the reason we don’t see many of these childhood diseases any more.”
Now that most COVID cases are relatively mild (thanks in large part to the work of vaccines), and serious side effects from vaccines are rare, fewer people are getting vaccinated as regularly as they once did. If you’re wondering whether and how often your children should be vaccinated, I say you should follow the advice of your doctor rather than the mutterings of Kennedy and his minions.
But as Rong-Gong Lin II reported for The Times, Kennedy’s new federal restrictions are making it difficult for people at higher risk to get access to the vaccine, even as cases surge.
Dr. Elizabeth E. Hudson, regional physician chief of infectious diseases for Kaiser Permanente Southern California, said people 65 and older, and those who are immunocompromised should get vaccinated. And so should healthy people of all ages if they’re in contact with high-risk populations.
Hudson told me mRNA technology is safe and effective, it goes back decades, and in the case of COVID vaccines, it allows scientists to quickly adapt to new strains.
“As someone who was on the front lines in 2021, I would never go back to that time, ever. It was horrible,” said Hudson. “It’s easy to forget, and nobody wants to dwell on it, but in L.A. County, we almost ran out of oxygen because so many people were needing [it] and being intubated. … It’s a vivid memory that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
“The vaccine changed the entire calculus and trajectory of COVID from an in-patient disease where many people died to an out-patient disease where the majority of people will feel miserable for a week or so, but they get better.”
Makes sense to me, but I’m not sure what to do about readers who disagree.
“I wanted to thank you for helping me out. Sometimes I forget just how brain dead the liberal left is but there is always an article or story to remind me,” said one. “Keep writing, I need the laughs.”
Will do.
And I’m feeling better now.
Could it be the vaccine?
steve.lopez@latimes.com
