It’s been more than two weeks since I got my second dose of Sinovac and the health struggles I have encountered are beginning. to ease up. I don’t want to associate my health struggle the past days with the vaccination, but my blood pressure was a problem like what one of the doctors at the vaccination site told me. He told me to monitor my blood pressure and go to my doctor if necessary. I did that and my doctor and I fought the seemingly runaway BP together. We refused to associate that to the vaccination, of course. One can’t be easily certain of things like that without proper study.
It’s sad when people jump to conclusions when it comes to things like this. Our vaccination effort is slow because of the combination of the lack of vaccine doses and the refusal of people to undergo vaccination. This is what has made the pandemic difficult to manage. There is too much information spread around that alarms instead of calms people.
Now we are hearing stories that the new variants of the coronavirus could render the vaccination effort useless. Those are mere warnings raised by some sectors, but these have already gripped the imagination of people. In this age when conspiracy theories easily become viral, that is worrisome.
In times like this, it would be best to put our trust both in God and in humanity itself. I read this post about the generation before ours having gone through worse: world wars, epidemics, economic downturns etc. Yet they survived it all. The point was this: Imagine if we were in that generation.
The difference now is that modern technology is amplifying the worries and the fears that the generation who didn’t have this technology felt. But the technology can also amplify the initiatives of those who battled to restore our trust in God and in humanity. Because it is during the dark moments that some people will be brave enough to light a candle.
We have seen the light at the end of the tunnel in this pandemic. That light is the vaccination effort by those concerned, including the government.
While we have been hitting the rich nations for getting much of the vaccine supply, some of them are actually trying to help the poorer nations. The United States, for example, has announced its plan to donate some of the vaccines, like what China did earlier, to other nations.
What we should worry about now are the surges in Covid-19 infections that other countries like India have experienced. There are lessons to be learned there, and if we just learn those lessons, we can prevent those surges from happening here even as we struggle to speed up the vaccination effort.
Unity and discipline are both needed here. I complain too much, but I am actually trying to give the government the benefit of the doubt. We may have had long lockdowns, but we have evaded the surges that would have put pressure on our problematic public health system. I hope, though, that government can find better ways to speed up the vaccination process. The US can be a good model, although admittedly we could not match the resources that it has. Perhaps we can find a setup there that could fit our situation here.