It’s early in the morning. The rickety hospital bed digs into your aching back as you lie in the hallway of this understaffed little clinic on the edge of nowhere. All of the rooms are already overflowing with other patients.
The plastic mask pumps oxygen into your sallow face, shielding you from the smell of body odor, sanitizer and putrefaction wafting on the stale hospital air. The sound of compressors, moans of pain and dying gasps for breath are by now gruesomely familiar to your ears.
As a harried nurse with bags under her eyes sweeps past your bed, you try to get her attention to ask how your partner is doing in the neighboring ward. But no sound passes your lips except a labored wheeze. In spite of the compressor thrumming away, you cannot fill your lungs with air. Despite your best effort, each breath feels shallower and shallower.
Animal panic slowly overtakes you. The realization dawns with the merciless insistence of fact: This is how you’re going to die, here and now. Your body jerks and rattles as you try to do something, anything to escape the slow asphyxiation pressing down on you. A doctor hurries over but you can no longer understand her words.
Your last coherent thought is something about skipping vaccination and the black body bag that will be your final resting place.
Now, picture yourself watching your beloved wife, husband, mother, father, child, grandparent or friend going through that in front of your eyes, knowing that you’re powerless to stop it.
That’s where your vaccine skepticism has led you. In Ukraine, less than 20 percent of the population is vaccinated, one of the lowest rates in Europe.
Ukraine is going through its deadliest wave of COVID‑19 to date. Daily deaths are expected to pass 1,000 soon. Daily hospitalizations have already passed 5,000.
And 95 percent of those hospitalized with the disease have not been vaccinated. Maybe they thought that a personal hunch trumps hundreds of thousands of man-hours of the world’s top medical minds. Maybe they succumbed to a misinformation campaign run by complete sociopaths, some of whom live in the Kremlin.
The reason matters little. Every refusal to vaccinate contributes to someone somewhere slowly choking to death and placing an unbearable burden on the country’s medical system, costing other lives in the process.
And then there are people who forge their vaccine certificates and the doctors who help them for a quick buck. Not only are they signing their own death warrant in case they do get sick with complications (you can’t get vaccinated if you’re already in the system), they’re unraveling the whole system and condemning an unknown number of people to a slow, tortured demise.
So pretty please, with sugar on top. Get the goddamn shot.
