Even before this Pandemic Thing was in all our lives, I was becoming more and more convinced that the three most dangerous creatures in the world are — and this is not in order of threat-level —
- The West Nile Virus Mosquito
- The Black Mamba Snake
- That friend of yours who thinks he or she knows more about medicine than Real Doctors
I've managed to avoid the first two of them so far but, alas, #3 can be found everywhere these days. None of what follows is meant to suggest that Real Doctors are infallible or that some of them might not be unworthy of the title.
But you know, if I ever need open-heart surgery, I think I'm going to go with the recommendations of my cardiologist over, say, a certain friend of mine who inks comic books for a living. The following sentence is not an exaggeration: I have lost friends and loved ones who I believe would be around today if they'd listened to Real Doctors…or even just listened to them a lot earlier than they did.
I understand and on some levels encourage skepticism of alleged experts. Life and years of reading MAD taught me to question authority…but some people get so paranoid that "the world is always lying to me" that they presume that if something sounds official, that alone proves it's wrong. If putative experts say "don't drink bleach," they want to run out and chug-a-lug a half-gallon of Clorox.
On the matter of vaccinations these days, I keep reading anti-vaxxers say, "Do your own research!" Do your own research where? On the Internet, where even they agree a large percentage of the alleged "information" is dead wrong?
Organizations like the F.D.A. and C.D.C. are spending zillions to test out vaccines and they employ folks who've spent decades studying this kind of thing. Maybe I should ignore that, haul out my old Gilbert Chemistry Set from when I was eight, get a sample somewhere of the Pfizer vaccine and run my own tests.
Or it just might be easier to listen to my own doctor. Or to be more specific, my general physician, my proctologist, my gastroenterologist, my dentist, my orthopedist, my urologist — I went through this list in an earlier post — my orthopedist, etc., and just take the vaccine they all recommend…which, of course, I already did.