This is one family's struggle with bearing up under the worry and angst over her little child's health.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/kids-under-5-vaccine-parents.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Sometimes I wake up to texts sent at 2 a.m. Sometimes they’re from Meg, who lives in Scotland and is several time zones ahead, telling us her 4-year-old woke up with a fever. Sometimes Kea, who lives in Maine, was up overnight with her 2-year-old. More texts come through the day in trickles and floods, in the group chat that’s been our support group since we were all pregnant at the same time. How’s your back? How’s your kid’s earache? How long did they tantrum for today? Make sure to swab their throat!
I get up, I make my own toddler breakfast. My husband drives him to day care. I text my friends back, I try to get to work. And I wait.
"There is a knife hanging over our heads, as there is for every parent of a kid under 5. The text alert will come, or the phone will ring with a call from school. An exposure. A symptom. Come get them. Come get them and stay home.
We just had to make it to the end of January, I thought. Past the peak of omicron. Maybe we’d even have an under-5 vaccine within sight. Anthony Fauci suggested spring might be possible. Unvaccinated and largely too young to mask, my son and his classmates are still subject to the full 10-day quarantine after an exposure. (A vaccinated 5-year-old who’s been exposed gets to come to school like normal as long as they don’t have symptoms.) We’d had exposures before—one over Thanksgiving 2020, then one in March 2021, both stretching into school holidays for extra measure—but during the summer and fall of last year we let go of the breath we’d been holding. Even through delta, our state kept its numbers low. But then omicron, and then the holidays, and then we were desperate again for the light at the end of the tunnel. When, the week before Christmas, we learned that the Pfizer trial for the under-5 vaccine was extendedbecause the two-shot dose wasn’t triggering a strong-enough immune response, I was the one helping my friends stay positive: Don’t worry, Moderna’s working on it, too. We just had to make to the end of January.
Apparently not. I was chasing my son around the house this weekend—literally, he runs laps to a playlist of four 30-second songs from Blaze and the Monster Machines, and he insists that one of us adults runs with him—when I saw the news: The Moderna vaccine trial for kids under 5 was being extended. Extended and delayed. And I felt like I’d been punched in the chest. I wandered off from the racetrack while Blaze kept blaring and hoped my son didn’t notice while I searched my phone for answers.
The worst part, maybe, was that this wasn’t even a press release. It wasn’t even big news. My colleague (with whom I was texting just this morning about her son’s latest fever; the network of parent support is diffuse and desperate) pointed out that we only found this out at all because a co–principal investigator on the Moderna clinical trials told a local Wisconsin news outlet, and someone else noticed and tweeted about the extended timeline for the study. January was no more. Now it was April. The worst part might be that no one even thought to officially announce it."
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏 🙏
And, since I lived through the whole of Polio from a small child until the second year of high school, I can tell you candidly, that my mother almost lost her mind worrying about her children. She would shake when we told her we were feeling this or that when we felt ill. I can understand the FEAR parents go through, because EVERY child is not going to be sick, but you do NOT want to LOSE yours by some act of WANTON FATE that doesn't care who it strikes, or when.
IF YOU CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO GET VACCINATED, THEN STAY IN YOUR OWN HOUSE AND AWAY FROM OTHER PEOPLE'S LITTLE ONES BECAUSE YOU COULD POTENTIALLY GIVE THEM COVID AND KILL THEM.
THE ODDS MEAN NOTHING TO A MOTHER WATCHING HER CHILD DIE BECAUSE YOU WERE AN IDIOT.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I’m going through some stuff but I will peek in now and then and will be back when it’s over..