‘Stick It To COVID’ – Take the Vaccine!

If and when you can get the vaccine, take it for the sake of yourself, your family and your community

And Hat’s Off to Our Dedicated Niagara Region Public Health Workers who are operating vaccination sites

A Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter and publisher           Doug Draper

Posted April 24^th, 2021 on Niagara At Large

When it comes to getting a needle, I am probably as much of a chicken as everyone else.

I was diagnosed with hay fever when I was a kid, and found myself having to get hay fever needles – at first every week, then monthly – for the next two or three years of my young life, which seemed like an eternity then.

I played minor league baseball at the time, and the injections would cause my arm to swell up with so much pain, that I could barely play a game.

So the thought of having to have a needle in the arm again, this past Friday, April 23^rd, to guard against COVID-19, kept me up most of the night before, with un-fond memories of those hay fever needles in mind.

Then my wife Mary and I went to the MacBain Community Centre in Niagara Falls this past Friday, April 23^rd, and we both held out a bare arm and received a shot of Moderna.

The people working the vaccine centre at the MacBain complex were working for Niagara Region’s Public Health Department, and they could not have been nicer.

All of those people deserve our support and thanks for the amount of support and patience they showed, even for people as paranoid as me about needles, to everyone who showed up to take their COVID shot.

If you have any doubts about Niagara regional government and the work its frontline staff do, you should have been there to witness what I say this April 23^rd, and your doubts might fade.

Over and over again, as we went through the hoops of reporting in for the vaccine, through receiving it from a health provider, and through checking out, and we were thanked over and over again by Regional Public Health Staff for coming, and for doing something that will not only protect ourselves from this killer virus, but will play a key role protecting members of our community.

It is so very much about doing something – during a time of an unprecedented health and economic crisis in our lifetime – for the common good.

And it made me think of all of those knuckleheads who showed up at that anti-lockdown rally in St. Catharines earlier this April, yelling out that the pandemic is a “hoax” and that the vaccine is some form of “bio-warfare.”

I urge you all to never mind these Covidiots and whatever alternative, Trumpy universe they are living in.

As the words on a button we were all given on our way out of the vaccination centre said; “Stick It To COVID.”,

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

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