“It was time,” said Jake Staley, a junior at Watauga, after receiving his second shot on Monday, September 13th.
COVID cases are once again on the rise in Watauga County. Here at the high school, the Delta variant has spread like a wildfire throughout the student body. According to an email from Superintendent Scott Elliot, 83 students have tested positive for COVID since the first day of school. Nurses reported that in the first week of September alone there were 9 positive cases at the school.
Besides the fact that students are getting sick, many students are also missing substantive amounts of time in school due to COVID complications. So far this year, 299 students who were considered close contacts have had to quarantine. 274 close contacts were able to stay in school due to adequate mask use, antibodies, and being vaccinated. If there was ever a period during this pandemic that could adequately be called “the time” to get vaccinated, it would be now.
Nurses at Watauga hoped that the recent FDA approval would help convince students to get vaccinated. Yet on Monday, when the nurses held a vaccine clinic, only 12 students came to get their shots.
Shelly Klutz, a nurse at Watauga, said, “I don’t know if the FDA approval really helped. We hoped it would have an influence.”
Klutz said that students are mainly choosing to get vaccinated now because the Delta variant is affecting younger ages more and because being vaccinated can reduce the chances of being quarantined for athletes.
Students who came to the clinic on Monday indicated that different factors persuaded them to get vaccinated now.
An anonymous source said that he got vaccinated because his grandfather “ is a diabetic and COVID could kill him, so I got it.”
Jackson Martin, a senior at Watauga, said the main reason he decided to get his shots was extracurricular activities.
“Mostly because I didn’t want to get close contacts and have to quarantine for football,” Martin said.
Staley said, “ I got my first shot last year, and then I had an appointment that I missed. Things got busy and I didn’t have time.”
On July 21st, the Secretary of Health and Human Services of NC said that people ages 12-17 were 24% vaccinated in NC. By August 16 that number had risen to 29%, indicating a slow rise. Despite this increase, many are still unwavering in their decision to not get their shots.
“Reservations come from it being a new vaccine, but that is usually misinformation because the mRNA vaccine is not new technology, it has been around for a while,” said Klutz. “So I think a lot of reservations are from misinformation and that’s what the school nurses do is we try to give out that correct information and also tell them to seek their primary care physicians guidance.”
Pfizer and Moderna, the two most popular COVID vaccines, work through mRNA technology. mRNA vaccines work differently than most vaccines. Unlike flu and measles vaccines, which use weakened versions of viruses to create antibodies, mRNA vaccines send messenger RNA to the DNA, stimulating it to produce “spike proteins” that are found on the COVID 19 virus. The immune system reacts to the spike protein and creates antibodies that counter COVID 19. This process does not alter or affect DNA whatsoever.
Contrary to what most people think, mRNA technology is not entirely new. mRNA technology has been experimented with and developed in cancer trials since 2011.
Another major reason why many people have been hesitant to get the vaccine is the astounding quickness with which the vaccine was created.
Klutz says, “Because the funding was there they were able to move [the process] a little faster and push it to the forefront.”
The Congressional Budget office estimates that nearly 20 billion dollars have been spent by the Biomedical Research and Development Authority alone related to COVID-19 vaccine development. This does not take into account previous research on mRNA technology.
Politics and social media aside, the experts, who dedicate their lives to keeping citizens safe, are saying the vaccine is safe. Getting vaccinated reduces risk of being quarantined and protects others.
“I think it is important that students, everybody gets vaccinated,” Klutz said.
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