Get Vaccinated!

"Poison Ivy," sung by the Coasters, written by Lieber and Stoller. 

To the best of my knowledge, there is no vaccine for poison ivy.

But if there is any other vaccine that you know of that may help you in whatever situation you find yourself in right now or plan to find yourself in soon, GET THE VACCINE.

I like this old song, written by Lieber and Stoller. The original hit was from the Coasters, but it was a popular cover for the English Invasion bands.

“Bee's will make you bumpy,

the mumps will make you lumpy,

and chicken pox will make you jump and twitch.

The common cold will fool you,

and whooping cough can cool you,

but brother Poison Ivy make you itch!”

It was funny to me that the English bands always blew the line, “whooping cough can cool you.” They didn't get the slang. Cool you; kill you. The whooping cough was a bad MF.

When the song came out, we all got those famous “childhood diseases.” The mumps, the chicken pox, and the measles. They could range from annoying to really terrible, depending on whether your system had been weakened by other things recently.

There were worse things, of course. Polio was worse. The whooping cough was worse. My sister got the whooping cough when she was a baby. It was fifty-fifty there for a while if we would lose her or not. Now, of course, these things have faded in the group-memory. Thanks to vaccines, no child has to fear any of those diseases any more.

I'm not up to date on scarlet fever, but you don't hear anything about it anymore. I have a hunch it's covered in one of those multi-vaccines that all children get now. That was also a bad one.

Among sensible people, there is no argument about becoming vaccinated as much as you can. I can tell you that the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Peace Corps, are big believers in vaccination. At boot camp, we got shots regularly. Sometimes we didn't even know what they were for. Just line up, stick out your arm, and shut the fuck up. They told us about the yellow fever shot, and they administered it to us at about one o'clock after an exhausting workout. Then, without giving us any lunch, they took us back to our barracks. We were all sick by the time we got there, and they sent us right to bed. They didn't wake us up at the usual frantic five o'clock wake up call the next morning either. We were feeling somewhat better by then, our fevers had broken and we were getting hungry, but there was no hurry.

The Peace Corps gave us a surprisingly wide array of vaccinations. Yellow fever, again. Denge fever, thanks for that, very common here and nasty. Thailand is still a rabies country, so just for luck they gave us all the full series of rabies shots. (They're all in the arm these days, so it's not the big deal that it once was.)

This being the case, since COVID is a bad thing to catch, and still regularly killing people, and there are vaccines around, GET THE GODDAMNED VACCINE ALREADY.

(I know that most of you have been vaccinated, and boosted too. Good choice on your part.)