Dealing with Peer Pressure

My wife is back at work for a publishing house located in Gaia just south of Porto. She's happy to be back with her colleagues. However, there's a few that cannot stop talking about the vaccine, and they want to know why my wife hasn't had her shot.

My wife has so far gotten away with some hand waving and the excuse that she hasn't gotten round to get it yet. But if they persist, she better find something more effective to say. She needs to come up with something that will stop them from coming back to her. Fortunately, that's not hard to do, because the people most eager to have us vaccinated are the ones most insecure about their decision. They want us vaccinated so that they themselves can feel more secure. If my wife says something that produces the exact opposite effect, they will stop nagging her.

The best way to do this is to draw the listener in with some innocent sounding observations, and then go on to the more sinister ones before delivering the spine chilling conclusions that can be drawn from it. Here's a list of things she could say:

1. The plague is basically over. There's hardly any cases anymore.
2. The Delta variant that's now becoming dominant is not very deadly.
3. The vaccine is not very effective against the Delta variant.
4. There's a Lambda variant as well, and the vaccine isn't effective against that either.
5. Vaccinated people run a higher risk of getting ill from Delta and Lambda.
6. Long term side effects of the vaccine are unknown.
7. Once taken, the vaccine cannot be un-taken.
8. Whatever potential for harm there may be remains with the vaccinated for life.
9. There's no legal recourse. Any cost associated with side-effects fall on the vaccinated.

If they persist in their insistence after this, my wife can go on to this list:

1. Why take the vaccine when it's already outdated?
2. Why risk unknown long term consequences of an untested medicine?
3. Taking the vaccine is stupid, and there's no lack of data to prove it.

My guess is that the nagging peer will give up half way through the first list. Everybody knows by now that the vaccine has been a failure, and the last thing the vaccinated want to hear is a list of reasons why they should have known better.

Lambda

By Dcoetzee, F l a n k e r - Own work, Public Domain, Link