Get Vaccinated for Your Family

As COVID-19 vaccines become more accessible and states begin to open eligibility to anyone over the age of 16, it is easy for people to feel like their lives will return to normal soon. There are many people who opt not to receive the vaccine for a host of different reasons. If you are on the fence about receiving the vaccine, check out these reasons to reconsider.

Vaccines protect you! Most infants are vaccinated for meningitis, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps and more. These shots do an incredible job of protecting them from serious illnesses, and the COVID vaccine is no different. Vaccines help train your immune system to fight infections faster and more effectively. When you get a vaccine, it triggers an immune response, helping it to fight off the germs.

Getting vaccinated helps protect the community you live in. When you choose to get vaccinated, you are not only protecting yourself from getting the virus and the potential long-term damage it could cause, but you are helping build community immunity, or herd immunity. As we have seen this past year, germs can travel quickly through a community and if enough people get sick it can lead to an outbreak. The more individuals who are vaccinated help slow or even stop the spread of germs thus decreasing the likelihood of sickness.

Vaccines protect the loved ones around you. Did you know that infants, the elderly, and those with weak or compromised immune systems, may not be able to get the vaccines that protect us from serious disease? When loved ones around them get vaccinated, it helps prevent them from serious illness.

The CDC recently updated its quarantine guidance with two key points. People who have been fully vaccinated within the last three months are no longer required to quarantine after exposure, and they can gather indoors and unmasked with other fully vaccinated people. This means that if you, your friends and family have been vaccinated then you can all gather to celebrate birthdays, graduations, weddings, and those milestone events that we have had to reschedule, postpone or cancel over the past year.

Experts say that getting the vaccine as soon as it’s available to you will be vital for protecting yourself and others, stopping the virus and their variants in their tracks, and resuming some level of normalcy. The sooner you get the vaccine, the sooner those around you are safer.

Rachael Kermis, MD
Baton Rouge General Health & Wellness Center
(225) 763-4900