Why vaccinate?

We have appreciated I am writing this note to share my thoughts about the importance of COVID vaccinations. You should first know that even though I taught 3,000 medical students when I was a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas, I avoid going to doctors because I believe in the natural ability of my body to heal itself. Vaccinations are not something I usually get.

The ability of COVID to kill is on a different scale than what I experienced when I served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. It took 14 years of fighting to kill 58,220 Americans, while COVID only needed a little more than one year to kill 601,281 Americans.

I became very worried about how this invisible virus was able to kill 3.8 million humans throughout the world in such a short time. All these people had families and friends who now grieve. That is when I decided that COVID was something that my body might not be able to handle by itself, and I really did not want to be killed by something that could be stopped by a vaccination. So on January 11, the good people at the Rockdale Brookshire Brothers gave me the shot at no cost to me and without pain or side effects.

There have been reports that COVID vaccinations cause side effects including a few deaths. But according to the medical websites I visited to prepare this article, side effects have only been experienced in 0.0017% of the 310 million COVID vaccinations administered in the United States.

Just to put this low number of COVID vaccination side effects in perspective, I looked up the side effects of Advil, an over-the-counter pain relief pill that in 2019 racked up $450 million of sales in the USA which is equal to about six billion pills. The maker of Advil lists the following as its possible side effects: heart attack, stroke, heart failure, stomach pain, severe stomach bleeding, vomiting of blood and severe allergic reactions including hives, facial swelling, asthma, shock, rash and blisters. In fact, all of these side effects are listed on the label attached to the Advil bottle. Yet this didn’t stop Americans, including me, from consuming six billion Advil pills in 2019.

And it has been reported that the use of Advil and similar nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs causes approximately 100,000 hospitalizations and 17,000 deaths every year. That number of deaths equals to 0.06% of the 29 million Americans who take Advil and other similar pain pills every year. That means you are 35 times more likely to die from taking Advil than from a COVID vaccination with death rate less than 0.0017%.

I have told you why I believe COVID vaccinations are not only important – but also safe. Over 99.9% of the 601,281 Americans who have died because of COVID were not vaccinated. It is easy to see that everyone who is not vaccinated has a chance of dying because of COVID. That chance was not worth it to me.

In this age where anybody can post anything on the internet, you are responsible for determining if the information is credible. When I want information about a medicine or a disease, I look for articles by medical experts. For COVID, I focus on reports by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. They both issue reports written by people who have spent their lives working in the public health field.

I welcomed the recent approval to vaccinate young people for COVID and the Milam County Commissioners Court’s decision to offer $250 for each young person vaccinated is all good in my book. I don’t consider the $250 as a bribe or charity. To me it is just one more “stimulus” check provided by our government to help recover our economy. And Milam County’s program has an additional benefit because it protects the cherished young men and women of Milam County from COVID.

Dr. Curtis Chubb was born in Fort Worth, received a doctorate of philsophy from The Johns Hopkins University, and was on the faculty of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.