Anti-Paxxers

Last week I wrote about having Covid. I mentioned that I’d been prescribed the anti-viral Paxlovid which immediately reduced my symptoms. While I’m aware some are politically opposed to the vaccine (the most dramatic example was the day I got my very first jab on this tiny island in the Chesapeake and was told it was the “mark of the beast,” prompting me to wonder if I should get a 666 tattoo at the injection site), I definitely hadn’t expected to receive private messages decrying my use of the treatment medication.

"I almost died from taking Paxlovid!” one reader decried. “You know that has the vaccine in it, right? Killed so many people!”

Christ, you gotta be kidding me, here we go. This feels like 2020. I have to get in this argument while I’m struggling as a candlemaker with the loss of smell in addition to the splitting headache I already have?

I’m of the mindset that if people don’t agree on things like politics or religion, we can simply scroll by in our social media feeds or unfollow the source of the crap we don’t want to see. I don’t need to argue with those with violently differing opinions, because I’m not going to change their minds or waste time and energy trying. In return, I expect the same courtesy. Listen, J6er, you’re never going to change my mind into believing your “plandemic” Biden hoax bullshit, so don’t come at me with the Fauci vaccine kills people bullshit either.

But I hadn’t heard about Paxlovid also having conspiracy theories around it until I received the DM. I Googled to see what the manufactured conspiracy was about. Unsurprisingly, I learned that people who’ve now become “Anti-Paxxers” believe that the government is controlling citizens via a microchip embedded inside Paxlovid pills. This in addition to the fact that, as I’d been informed, the deadly vaccine is also hiding in the drug. Maybe your lost keys or cell phone charger are in there as well, and that’s what’s causing that metallic taste. Busy little pill.

Regardless of what’s causing Paxlovid conspiracy theorists to work overtime, the fact remains that it saves lives. Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s Covid response coordinator, told The New York Times that daily deaths from the pandemic could drop by almost 90 percent if every Covid patient over the age of 50 was treated with Paxlovid. Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco, also told The Times that he thought the underuse of Paxlovid was already associated with thousands of preventable deaths in the U.S.

I wrote back to the reader and told her I was pretty sure, since Covid has killed around 7 million people, the epidemic has killed more people than the medicine prescribed to reduce its symptoms, so we’d have to disagree on that and I’m guessing everything else. The world would be a better place, or at least the internet would, if we learned when to just keep scrolling past ideas we don’t agree with.