To Vaccinate or not to Vaccinate: It’s a matter of when, not whom

Afsheen Misaghi is the director of ‘Normal for Now,’ a four-part anthology only on Amazon Prime. (Misaghi)

It’s funny how things from your past can resurface in ways you least expect.

When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Bowling Green State University nearly 30 (ahem) years ago, I led my IPC 101 (Introduction to Interpersonal Communication) students in a discussion exercise. The finer points have been lost along with a few brain cells, but the gist of it was something like this:

• A nuclear bomb detonated near Toledo, OH. As soon as the air raid sirens sounded, 10 people were fortunate enough to scramble to a nearby fallout shelter. Now that the worst has happened, they must face the fact that the shelter was designed to house eight people for three months. In your group, read over the bios of the people who are in the shelter then discuss and decide who should remain.

The group of 10 was an eclectic bunch and included a person in their 80s, a scientist, a wide receiver from the Detroit Lions, a young couple with their infant, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and three other “person on the street” type folks. Few details were available about any one person. I instructed my students to work with the information at hand—not make assumptions or read more into the “biographies” than what was on the page.

Discussions that ensued were most always lively, if not argumentative. Some groups tried to re-write the rules, much like the young James T. Kirk did when faced with the Kobayashi Maru exercise. Others role-played the characters, making impassioned pleas for their lives. But, at the end of class, each group had to provide their list of eight. The only wrong response was deciding not to decide.

Even though I had grown up with made-for-TV-movies like The Day After and Threads, I still felt the threat of an actual nuclear event was remote. The exercise seemed a little outdated and inconceivable. While the goal was to have students engage in a structured discussion with an element of ethics thrown in, some wondered what the practical implications were.

Fast forward three decades and change the scenario from nuclear holocaust to a global pandemic. A vaccine is created, but the demand for inoculation outpaces the number of doses available. Who, or what groups, are prioritized to receive shots? A lightbulb comes on; the class exercise doesn’t seem that far-fetched any longer.

The discussion forum is no longer a classroom on a northwest Ohio college campus, but on multiple social media platforms. It has been enlightening to see how people respond to the question of who should be getting the vaccine and their reasons for a particular answer.

And then something interesting began happening. As people realized the supply (at least initially) of available vaccines would not be enough to provide protection for everyone who wanted it, some began making a case for opting out of the Covid shot. However, what was intended to be a magnanimous gesture could have more dire consequences.

Unlike the fallout shelter scenario, we have access to additional perspectives to help inform our decisions. In this narrative, the additional perspective is from my niece Catherine Blackwood, a PhD candidate at West Virginia University. She recently posted the following to Facebook in response to a friend’s expressed dilemma about not getting vaccinated so that someone else in a more vulnerable or exposed group could have the dose.

• “As a scientist who researches vaccines…get it as soon as it is offered, and do not feel like you’re skipping a line or that other people need it more. Get it. You being vaccinated helps others too. You being vaccinated means you will develop the protection you need to keep fighting for others to get the vaccine too. Get it and feel good about that decision.”

When I went through the fallout shelter exercise with that first group of underclassmen, never did I think I’d have opportunity to reimagine that scenario relative to a global pandemic. Nor did I fathom that I’d be taking advice from my niece (who hadn’t been born at the time I was teaching). Yet I see the parallels between the two situations. And the only wrong response is deciding to not decide.