Amidst all of the insanity going on, we're still in a pandemic. Over 1 million Americans have died from COVID, millions of children have lost parents, millions have lost loved ones, and millions more are suffering from the effects of Long COVID. Yet throughout this pandemic, children under 5 are the only group that haven't been able to get a COVID vaccine. But with the FDA finally recommending authorization for under 5 year olds to receive Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, that may finally have changed.
For over two years, conscientious parents like my wife and I have had to rely on little more their own actions to protect their children, alongside the hope that others are being responsible as well. And if COVID has taught us anything, it's that a disgustingly huge number of our fellow Americans could not care less about trying to do what's best for others if they're even slightly inconvenienced.
Our recent decision to send our son to preschool recently came after a long discussion and debate, after which we ultimately decided that his continued growth and development depended on him finally being able to be around other children his own age. Given his recent diagnosis as being on the autism spectrum, we know that we reached the limit of how much we could help him with that by ourselves. But that decision also came with the knowledge that he might indeed catch COVID with unknown potential long-term consequences. That's the tradeoff. We didn't take it lightly or flippantly. But ultimately his need for socialization won out. And there will always be a nagging Catch-22 for us, if he catches COVID, we should have kept him at home longer, but if he doesn’t, did my wife and I let him down by not getting him out in the world earlier. But that’s our burden alone to bear because our son, like every child, just deserves to have as good and healthy a childhood as he can.
So when I say that since March 15, 2020, which is the date that our region first enacted a COVID lockdown, we've been very worried about how we would protect our son from COVID, I'm being dead serious. We went through pain and a lot of heartbreak to have our son. My wife had two heartbreaking miscarriages before getting pregnant with our son. Our son was born five weeks premature with severe bilateral clubfoot and spent the first week of his life in the NICU. My wife had to have an emergency c-section because she came down with severe preeclampsia and was at risk of a stroke, and she had to be hospitalized for six days to recover.
There are many dear friends of ours he's never met because we've been very cautious. And it's beyond disappointing that there are many relatives he's never met because they refuse to be responsible about COVID. But something important that I’ve come to realize these past two plus years is that their refusal to take even the bare minimum of precautions isn't on us. It's on them and them alone. We’re just trying to do what’s best for our son in a time nobody alive has ever experienced before.
If that sounds judgmental, tough. I don't care about their feelings when those feelings could put my son's health in danger. We've known for a long time what we could all do to slow the spread of COVID, but too many people have shown themselves to be utterly incapable of acting responsibly. If you intentionally choose to not act responsibly, then you are part of the problem whether you like it or not.
Nothing about parenting, or life itself, is completely without risk. Nothing is absolutely 100% safe. But when there is some type of potential danger to my child's health, you can rest assured that I take that very seriously, and I will do whatever I can to try and protect my son's well-being.
I say all of this to frame the fact that there's now finally a realistic shot of being able to get our son his COVID vaccinations in the very near future, and that, to me at least, is something akin to a light at the proverbial "end of the tunnel". We'll still be very cautious, we're still wary of catching or spreading COVID, but for the first time since our now almost three-year-old son was just nine months old, there's a little bit of hope that he'll finally have some extra protection, and finally get the chance to have something resembling the normal childhood that's been stolen from him so far.