A brief encounter with an anti-vaxxer

When you hear an antivaxxer on the damning effects of the vaccine.

Yesterday, my wife called a friend. As is the case these days, the conversation turned quickly into the status of vaccination. My wife told her friend some of us in the family were done and some were half-way there. She asked her friend if their family had gotten vaccinated yet. The friend told her that they did not have any plans to get vaccinated because the vaccination was all a ploy to get the entire population sterile!

My wife, who lost a nephew to COVID-19 a few months ago, told the friend that the havoc the virus was wreaking across the globe was real, that there had been a death in the family, and any potential side effects of the vaccine were clearly not significant compared to the dangers of the virus. The friend argued that COVID hadn’t killed anyone. It was just like flu (reminded one of another infamous person who said the exact same thing). Crying over the phone, she beseeched my wife to save those of us not fully vaccinated yet!

We were shocked when my wife recounted the conversation to us. We have known the family for a long time: a regular, suburban family in northern Virgina – with aspirations, dreams and fears just like us. It was hard to understand that they actually believed this.

It’s as if we are living in parallel universes. We access and believe the information that we want to believe and these two parallel Americas are drifting further away from each other. Trump deepened this rift and his four years in office have pulled the two Americas apart like never before. But how will this end?