Starting again, after the vaccine

It takes 14 days to achieve a pretty good level of immunization after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. For my partner and I, that will be April 24th. This is the same vaccine that seems to have caused some cases of blood clots in about one out of a million people, so its use has been paused on recommendation from the federal government. Which seems … unwise. So what I mean is that we will be fully immunized if I live until April 24th.

Some people claim that the vaccines are actually ways for the government to inject nanobots into our blood. That is probably not true, but I do wish the vaccine did more than just protect me from COVID. I wish it could redistribute wealth, pass stronger protections for workers, make it easier to unionize, and provide universal healthcare. I wish it could break up monopolies and oligopolies, reforest the Amazon, and get plastic out of the ocean. I wish each shot would also give each person a best friend that lived on their block and erase their credit card debt. I wish it would re-engineer government budgets away from policing and towards real community health and mass transit.

Mass vaccination is, I suppose, a chance to begin again. But we’re not starting from scratch. We will never have that luxury. We have to start from where we are. And sometimes it really seems like we’re just standing in a big pile of shit. But still, it’s a start.