Vax and violence.

Many people are concerned with the various vaccines being readied for public use to prevent infection by Chinese Death Virus, a.k.a. Wuhan Flooey (#1 Super Bug). I've looked at the data for some of them and am impressed by the number of subjects being sought for testing. For example, in June the Moderna Inc. was looking for 30,000 volunteers. That's a pretty darn good sample size.

I know a lot of people are nervous about taking the vaccine. Some may be old enough to remember the 1976 Swine Flu debacle. Americans were urged to get the shot to stop an expected pandemic of swine flu that never really materialized (although that same year Legionnaires' disease did, as The Smithsonian points out). About 450 people who got that shot came down with Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body's immune system attacks the nerves. It is not a walk in park. The CDC estimates that 1 in 100,000 people who got the shot came down with GBS who otherwise would not have.

Others who don't recall that event may just be afraid of a hastily assembled vaccine by companies who stand to make billions. Or they're just anti-vaxxers in general. Whatever the reason, I can understand. This is a scary issue, and we're all pretty punchy after months of bad news and terror.

I am not alarmed about it, though. If a vaccine clears a large sample without serious adverse effects, I'd try it. It would be for the public good, and if it worked I'd feel like I had a superpower. Really specific invulnerability. 

If it made me break out in spots, that would not be too bad. I'd prefer if they were stripes, at least vertical stripes. Slimming. Not big, wide stripes; too mobster. Nice, thin pinstripes.

But if the government were to demand that I and everybody else get the vaccine, that would frighten me. A government on any scale that can force everyone to get a vaccine is a much greater threat than any illness.

That's not going to happen under Mr. Trump. I'm not sure about Mr. Biden. He seems to have the impression that the federal government can force people to wear masks, or at least he sounded that way in the past; he seems to have been corrected later. Going by his campaign videos, he now seems to think that the violence racking American cities is caused by Trump supporters and right-wingers rather than the communists and anarchists who actually are the bad actors. He and his people seem to believe some very strange and controversial things, but if you wait a few days they seem to believe the opposite. So I would imagine they could mandate a vaccine, and then deny that they did so if people start getting sick from it. Seems like an odd way to govern.