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Letter: Living thanks to earlier vaccination campaigns

Looking back at treatments, medication and experimentation
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Congratulations.

You’re alive and reading this mainly because, years ago, you survived polio, meningitis, measles, tetanus, whooping cough, smallpox and a bunch more terrifying diseases pretty much totally because of the public health campaigns to immunize you against these diseases.

I went through the same program throughout my school life and did not die. None of my classmates died, either from the immunization process or from the diseases – if they did, it was a well-kept secret.

So, having proven yourself a healthy, well-adjusted product of the many immunization campaigns, you are now put in the position of facing another decision. You have a clear choice: do you bite the bullet and take the shot or do you take your chances with a virus that has no compassion for you – it doesn’t care if you live or die.

The immunization technology is not perfect or guaranteed. Very few medical procedures are. In my lifetime I’ve taken many courses of broad-spectrum oral antibiotics, sometimes because of no clear-cut diagnosis (experimentation).

The work on immunization technology is ongoing, and can do nothing but improve as time goes by.

Life on this Earth is harsh and not all of us survive intact to a good old age. There are no guarantees – we all make our best decisions and hope for the best. Mankind as a whole makes big decisions based on observation and experimentation and trial and error and has kept incredibly large populations of humans alive (arguably to the detriment of a well-balanced Earth). Choices are made and we hope for the best. We now have another choice to make, and then to reap the benefits or suffer the consequences. Good luck with that.

G. LeDuc

Read more: Salmon Arm businesses react to B.C.’s vaccine passport system



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