While the teachers’ unions colluded with the Centers for Disease Control to keep teachers out of the classroom during the Covid pandemic and the elites burrowed in their apartments, the working class kept working every darn day. So, if you got vaccinated, thank the working class.

Staff writer for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, decided to poll social media to discover why some out there in the hinterlands are vaccine resistant or vaccine hesitant. He promised those he talked to that he wasn’t writing a hit piece, but he just wanted to know why they hadn’t been vaccinated. His piece is titled “Millions Are Saying No to the Vaccines. What Are They Thinking?”. The subtitle is “Feelings about the vaccine are intertwined with feelings about the pandemic.” To which most of us would say, “No, do tell.” His third paragraph down:

What are they thinking, these vaccine-hesitant, vaccine-resistant, and COVID-apathetic? I wanted to know. So I posted an invitation on Twitter for anybody who wasn’t planning to get vaccinated to email me and explain why. In the past few days, I spoke or corresponded with more than a dozen such people. I told them that I was staunchly pro-vaccine, but this wouldn’t be a takedown piece. I wanted to produce an ethnography of a position I didn’t really understand.

Calling these poll respondents “Covid apathetic” is kind of harsh, in my opinion. Some of us believed the Covid virus was bad, bad, bad from the beginning. We heard the lies coming from the Chinese Communist Party and the conflicting information coming from our Nation’s government scientists. We watched small businesses destroyed while the Big Box stores and their government lobbyists thrived. We watched as the country’s scolds lectured the un-masked. We watched as President Donald Trump proclaimed that Americans could be vaccinated by April, 2021:

Then, we watch as Saint Anthony Fauci eye rolled and shook his head in front of the press to indicate Trump was a liar. We listened as both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pooh-poohed the idea of a vaccine under President Trump. Biden said:

With deaths from the coronavirus nearing 200,000 in the United States, Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday assailed President Trump for playing politics with a potential coronavirus vaccine, saying he did not trust Mr. Trump to determine when a vaccine was ready for Americans.

“Let me be clear: I trust vaccines,” Mr. Biden said. “I trust scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either.”

Harris said:

“I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump” on the reliability of a vaccine, Harris said. The California senator, however, added that she would trust a “credible” source who could vouch that a vaccine was safe for Americans to receive.

We watched both Biden and Harris get the vaccine and not even bother to thank Donald Trump. The die was cast. We sat back, stroked our chins, and engaged in rational skepticism. We knew that millions of Americans went to work every day, regardless of the lethality of the virus. The working class never had a choice.

Here is the paragraph, from Mr. Thompson’s vaccine hesitancy article, that crystallized this thought for me:

My view of the vaccines begins with my view of the pandemic. I really don’t want to get COVID-19. Not only do I want to avoid an illness with uncertain long-term implications, but I also don’t want to pass it along to somebody in a high-risk category, such as my grandmother or an immunocompromised stranger. For more than a year, I radically changed my life to avoid infection. So I was thrilled to hear that the vaccines were effective at blocking severe illness and transmission. I eagerly signed up to take both my shots, even after reading all about the side effects.

Later, he says:

Although I think I’m right about the vaccines, the truth is that my thinking on this issue is motivated. I canceled vacations, canceled my wedding, avoided indoor dining, and mostly stayed home for 15 months. All that sucked. I am rooting for the vaccines to work.

Well, woop-de-dooh for you lil’ boo boo. You had that choice.

The working class spent 15 months without being vaccinated making sure you could spend your time at home. Where do you think the food that got delivered to you came from? How do you think the water and electricity stayed on? Who researched that vaccine you got?

Thompson talked to a vaccine hesitant truck driver:

Many people I spoke with said they trusted their immune system to protect them. “Nobody ever looks at it from the perspective of a guy who’s like me,” Bradley Baca, a 39-year-old truck driver in Colorado, told me. “As an essential worker, my life was never going to change in the pandemic, and I knew I was going to get COVID no matter what. Now I think I’ve got the antibodies, so why would I take a risk on the vaccine?”

So, Thompson talked to Bradley Baca and others and this is how he summed up their thought process:

The coronavirus is a wildly overrated threat. Yes, it’s appropriate and good to protect old and vulnerable people. But I’m not old or vulnerable. If I get it, I’ll be fine. In fact, maybe I have gotten it, and I am fine. I don’t know why I should consider this disease more dangerous than driving a car, a risky thing I do every day without a moment’s worry. Liberals, Democrats, and public-health elites have been so wrong so often, we’d be better off doing the opposite of almost everything they say.

If that’s what you got from talking to someone like Bradley, you don’t think, at all. Bradley didn’t have a choice. If he didn’t go to work, you would have starved in your apartment, staring at the cold, dead phone in your hand.

The Atlantic article would have been much better, if the vaccinated writer had just thanked the working people who enabled him to live through the pandemic. Thank you to everyone who worked every day during the Wuhan Flu pandemic. We really appreciate everything you did.

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