By Alexis Allen
10 May, 2021
EUGENE, Ore. — It’s now been five months since the first COVID-19 vaccine was administered, a step that finally seemed like the light at the end of a perpetual tunnel. However, there is still a number of skeptical people who refuse to get the shots.
While the vaccine rollout in the United States has been relatively fast-paced, the United Kingdom is experiencing a bit of a slower process. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost half of the US population is fully vaccinated while barely 34% of the UK population is.
Connor Shrimpton, a student studying music production at the City of Liverpool College, is among the majority of people who have not yet gotten the vaccine in England—and he says he doesn’t plan on getting it at all.
Shrimpton believes the vaccine should only be given to older people with underlying health conditions. “Vaccinating healthy active people is just stupid in my opinion because you don’t need to fix what isn’t broken,” he says.
He says he is not afraid of the vaccine itself, but instead he fears for those who decide to get it. “There would be no chance you will ever see me line up and get one, even if there was a real pandemic,” he says.
Shrimpton says his reaction to the COVID vaccine is not different from other administered vaccines in the past. “Ever since a young age, when I first learned about vaccines, I was confused as to why people became dependent on them,” he says. “I used to talk to my dad about things like this and he had the exact same views as me.”
Shrimpton says that “it’s way too soon for a vaccine to come out” and he questions why health professionals “would risk vaccinating millions upon millions of people with an experimental vaccine when we don’t know the long-term side effects.”
Someone else who is concerned with the long-term health effects that the vaccine poses is Tatjana Mandic, a sophomore at the University of Oregon. She says she does not plan on getting the vaccine anytime soon and is extremely apprehensive “considering COVID has been around for about a year and vaccines typically take years to develop.”
Her main worry is that the vaccine will cause fertility issues in women. “They have zero research of the side effects from the vaccine!” she says. “I don’t know if it is true or not but it very well could cause younger generations to have fertility issues.”
She also says the recent reports of blood clots that people are experiencing as a result from the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is a tell-tale sign of this vaccine’s trustworthiness.
Apart from the possible side effects regarding the vaccine, Shrimpton believes there’s a bigger purpose behind it. “I’m 100% sure this is a depopulation agenda and I hate to say this, but I think in the next few years we are going to see well over a billion people die,” he says.
When it comes to the media, Shrimpton says the problem is that it is intentionally “feeding us information about this so-called pandemic to promote fear.” He says that mask mandates and new variants of the virus circulating the media every day are only scaring people into getting the vaccine. He compares COVID to World War II when “Germany’s main form of propaganda was fear.” Despite the media’s attempts to instill worry, however, he says that the younger generations are not falling for it and “people are beginning to wake up to the fact that they have been controlled by the government.”
In England, there has been an outbreak of protests from people who don’t support the vaccine. “A few weeks ago there was a huge protest of over 700,000 people in London. I support the people who are fighting for our freedoms,” Shrimpton says. However, he says news outlets have not been covering the protests and that the government is purposely avoiding these events in order to gain the public’s trust.
Some citizens in the U.S. also believe that the media is deliberately hiding important information regarding the vaccine. Flor Harris, who works in the health care insurance business in the Bay Area, says the media does not want to show the bad aspects of the vaccine in hopes of getting as many people vaccinated as possible. “There’s been almost 4,000 people that have died just from taking the vaccine and they don’t want to bring too much attention to that,” she says. She believes nobody should be dying from the vaccine at all and that the government needs to take action.
Because the media plays such a big role in advocating for the COVID vaccine, young adults who are learning how to make health care decisions on their own for the first time say they are concerned with being judged by the public. Capri Macchiarella, a freshman at the College of Southern Nevada, believes that “no one should be shunned for any personal health choice they make.”
Harris also believes everyone should have the ability to get vaccinated or not without being shamed. “It seems like the current political climate doesn’t allow you to really speak your mind if you have any concerns…because so many people around you want to shut you down,” she says. She believes this judgmental mindset is unfair and that “everyone should have their own choice because it is their body.”
Apart from the vaccine itself, Shrimpton believes the most problematic aspect of the virus is the pandemic lockdowns that have occurred since last March. “The governments of the world locked us up in our homes for over a year, not getting sunlight, weakening our immune systems,” he says.
Shrimpton believes that health professionals and news outlets should instead promote alternatives to the vaccine, such as practicing good diet or using natural supplements and vitamins. “The medical industry today is a mess, and it’s all about making money. They don’t care about your health at all, they would rather inject you with vaccines and drugs than intentionally try to promote healthy eating or exercise. It is frustrating that a lot of people don’t see the truth,” he says.
Not everyone will agree with each other all the time. People will always have conflicting views about certain topics, especially when that topic affects all of humanity. This vaccine is an example of that—it can be supported by one person but rejected by the next.
“You might think I sound crazy but only time will tell,” Shrimpton says.