This column is a difficult one to write.
As the editor and publisher of a newspaper, there’s a lot about my personal life that you know. You have gotten to know my wife and two little girls over the last four years, and you’ve even gotten to know my extremely aggravating dog, Buster.
But there are some things I choose to keep private, my health care decisions for one.
I’ve always been a big believer in medical freedom, and that has not changed.
When I decided to get the COVID-19 vaccine back during the spring, I purposefully didn’t change my Facebook profile picture to reflect that decision, and I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the decision once here in the paper.
It’s not that I was ashamed of the decision. It’s just that I believe in medical privacy.
If someone asked me in private, I gladly revealed my vaccination status.
“I got the jab,” I’d say. “Not only that, I got the J&J, about four days before they temporarily took it off the market for potential blood clotting issues.”
It was too late at that point. I couldn’t take it back. I might as well admit it.
Back when I got the shot, the virus was almost non-existent in Mississippi. We were down to a miniscule amount of daily cases, and hospitalizations and deaths were at their lowest point of the pandemic.
But after doing a lot of research on viruses and vaccines in general, I determined for myself that the pandemic was not over.
I knew it would be back, and as long as our total vaccination and infection rate was below 70%, it would probably be back several times.
Being 38 years old, I had the luxury of waiting in line for the vaccine for a few months.
In other words, by the time they opened it up to a younger, non-health care, non-teacher person like myself, I had a pretty good sample size to look at to determine whether the side effects would be deadly…or even near deadly.
The fact of the matter is that after several months of studying this, the number of severe reactions to the vaccine was very low.
Most people felt some symptoms of the virus for 24 hours or so, but that went away.
I do go to the doctor on a regular basis, and I exercise, but I am approaching 40. I am overweight. I have high cholesterol.
See, you’re finding out things about me you didn’t know, or maybe didn’t care to know, but this is how strongly I feel about this.
There is no way for me to know how my body is going to react to COVID-19.
Would I simply take a week off work and deal with the sniffles, or would I be like my 26-year-old friend who’s been on a ventilator for the past five days now?
I didn’t want to find out.
Being an advocate for medical freedom does not always have to end in an anti-establishment conclusion.
I tried for years to use supplements to fight off my cholesterol problem, but this year I had to come to the painful conclusion that they were no longer effective.
My doctor prescribed a medicine for the cholesterol.
I have the medical freedom to choose not to fill that prescription. But I chose to fill it.
That’s the wonderful thing about medical freedom. It’s freedom.
But freedom does come with a price.
Patients in America each day choose to continue to smoke. If they’re like me, they choose to consume alcohol and eat red meats while fighting high cholesterol, and some patients flatly refuse to take their meds.
Simply practicing medical freedom doesn’t automatically mean you make the choice that will yield the best outcomes.
A lot of my libertarian friends shook their heads in disgust when I told them I got the vaccine, but it wasn’t a political decision. It was a medical decision.
I didn’t turn into a rabid liberal when I walked out of the clinic that day.
I was the same person I always was and the same person I hope to be for a few more decades.
If the issue of medical freedom versus medical tyranny is driving your decision to not get the vaccine, all I can do is ask you to reevaluate, because if your decision is simply to move in the direction of collectivist libertarian thinking, then you have no real medical freedom to protect.
Make sure when you make that final decision on whether or not to get the vaccine that it’s truly your decision.
