A Plea To My Unvaccinated Adult Children

I remember when each of you was born, the second I held you, I knew I do anything in my power to keep you safe.

Even during pregnancy, I followed my doctor’s advice so you would have the healthiest start to life possible. I stopped using table salt, and drank more water. I took those crazy huge prenatal vitamins.<

When you were babies, I made sure you never missed a well-check, and we kept up on your infant immunization schedule.

When you got sick, I monitored you closely. If you weren’t getting better, we’d head to the pediatrician. I’d follow doctors’ orders to a “T” making sure I gave you all your antibiotics and kept you hydrated. Thank goodness modern medicine meant your childhood illnesses were easily overcome.

As you got older, the desire to keep you safe remained a considerable concern. I taught you to hold my hand in busy parking lots, not to go anywhere with strangers, and fire safety.

As a teenager, teaching you to be a safe driver became my mission. I remember how nervous I was those first few times you drove alone. I also remember my worry when you missed your curfew, and I didn’t know where you were. The rules were always, always just to see you safely to adulthood.

And now that you are an adult, it is your job to keep yourself safe. I don’t make those decisions for you anymore.

But I do have an ask of you. Now I need you to do something to keep ME safe.

Please get the COVID vaccine. I am not as young and healthy as you are. The risk to me is higher than the risk to you. And although I have gotten my vaccine, and it’s 95% effective, what if. What if you contracted COVID and gave it to me, or one of your friends’ parents, or a child too young to get vaccinated? What if it cost that person their life?

Like the immunizations I made sure you got as an infant to keep you safe, now I am asking you to do the same for me.

If you are afraid for any reason, talk to your doctor. Talk to multiple doctors. Get your information from the professionals you know and trust. The professionals you’d go to if you had a sinus infection or a broken bone. Get your information from the professionals you’d turn to if you had a life-threatening disease.

Modern Medicine isn’t perfect, but none of us would choose to go back in time to when children died at alarming rates from diseases that my kids, that the kids you may have one day, don’t have to die from. We wouldn’t want to go back in time to when cancer of any kind was a death sentence. We wouldn’t want to go back in time to when life or death was pure luck.

What we all want as a society is the best chance to live the longest and healthiest life possible. To enjoy our family and friends. And sometimes, we are tasked with doing something just for someone else. And sometimes, that thing is a vaccine.

So please, get the vaccine that keeps me, and others you care about, safe.

I know you don’t want to, but I am asking you to do it anyway. Please, do it for me.