It's that season again — flu and COVID needle season.
Sure, it's autumn as well, but where's the controversy in changing colours and frosty mornings?
Both influenza and new COVID XBB variant vaccines are now ready for up-rolled sleeves. That news — as it has in the past four years — will, and has, generated several avenues of reaction.
For most people, the idea of a needle to reduce or avoid illness is a quick and easy decision. When and where can I book? For others who are coming into the needle season, the prickly question is why?
The answer to that — for many — is clear. To save lives, to reduce illness, to keep emergency rooms and health professionals available for non-preventable situations or life and death scenarios that cannot be determined by getting a single needle poke.
But in a world where groups of disenchanted can rally others to hold protests over freedoms lost, it's just not that easy to tell people to roll up those sleeves and do what's best.
Some degree of fear or trepidation must be expected when foreign bodies are introduced directly into the body, yet somehow, cigarettes, vapes and hot-dogs all manage to fly under that radar. But vaccines, the very things made specifically to help? They continue to be the tipping point.
Getting a needle can save lives. The last four years have shown the world that’s a true statement.
Perhaps it needs to be simplified even more; like the cigarette pack sticker "Smoking Kills," maybe each needle should have "Vaccines Save" written on their side.
No matter what is done, how many bull-horns or data sheets, experts' pleas or images of despair and upheaval, some will always oppose the norm.
It's a shame that at this time of year — a time of beauty and colour and change — that people must be begged to do what's right in order to be here next year to see the beauty again.
