A trip inside the mind of a Covid jab fanatic

She's like those fabled Japanese soldiers who refused to believe World War 2 was over and wouldn't surrender

(Keeping it light and away from the Middle East, again. You know the news is baaaad when even I can’t deal with it.)

Demand for mRNA Covid jabs has plunged. Americans have moved on from the virus.

But not every American.

Today we walk with Maggie Gordon on her quest to keep her Covid virginity intact.

Maggie seems nice, in a liberal white lady kinda way. She majored in women’s studies and graduated from Syracuse University in 2008. She is married. She writes for the “Houston Landing,” a local nonprofit journalism site.

And Maggie hates Covid.

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(The news you need, the attitude you need even more. All for 20 cents a day. C’mon, man!)

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Does she ever.

As Maggie explained in a column in Houston Landing Monday about the new booster, to avoid getting Sars-Cov-2 in 2020, she “reconfigured” her wedding, and she and her new husband “skipped holidays with our families in the Northeast to say safe.”

So when Pfizer and Moderna gave us the miracle of mRNA, Maggie was ready. When she couldn’t find a vaccine quickly in Houston, she drove “hundreds of miles” to a rural county near the Louisiana border where “they were offering shots to young, healthy adults even during what was supposed to be a phased release.”

Look, when you need a hit of that sweet mRNA, you do what you gotta do.

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(But Maggie, all that gas you burned, what about climate change? Hope you planted a tree!)

SOURCE

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These days even Maggie isn’t quite as crazy about Covid as she used to be.

Sometimes she is “able to even forget that COVID-19 circulates among us.” (How can she be so cavalier?!? I’m going to report her to Dr. Jerome Adams, our once-respected former Surgeon General, who now spends his days comparing Covid to car accidents.)

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(Nope, not making this up. I wish I were:)

SOURCE

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Anyhoo, back to Maggie.

She is now so relaxed about Covid that she waited weeks - weeks, I tell ya! - for her new booster.

But last Wednesday, the moment of truth arrived.

She rolled up her sleeve and took the shot, either her fourth or more likely fifth shot. (Let’s all take a moment to recall Covid jabs have never been tested past three doses in large or even medium-sized placebo-controlled clinical trials for healthy adults. We have no idea what their long-term effects might be.)

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(What are we doing? Subscribing! When are we subscribing? Now!)

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Then the story gets hinky. For Maggie admits the side effects from all her previous shots were brutal:

Every dose of the vaccines has hit me hard. I remember trying to peel myself out of bed after the second shot in April, 2021, knowing I had hours of work ahead of me at my home office, even if it hurt to blink. The fall 2021 booster hit me like a ton of bricks, as it wrapped itself in third-trimester fatigue.

Sounds worse than Covid for a healthy thirty-something woman. But Maggie wouldn’t know. As far as she knows, she has never had Covid, making her the last person in in America who has dodged Sars-Cov-2.

The vaccines must work after all!

Though work is relative. Sure enough, last Wednesday’s jab again laid Maggie low:

[I was] miserable on Thursday. I felt so dizzy and hot when I awoke in the morning to send our toddler off to day care that I had to lay down halfway through putting on her shoes. I went back to bed, where I cursed not being able to roll over onto my left side, due to pain at the shot site…

Am I the only one who suspects Maggie would be far better off dealing with the Omicron runny nose and sore throat than this misery? Especially since no matter how many shots she takes, sooner or later she will get Omicron. And then get it again.

Alas, she’ll have to learn that lesson herself.

Seems more and more that the only people who still fear Covid are those who’ve never had it.