This is a love letter to my beloved community from a frontline physician in the hospital COVID wards who also happens to be a musician.
Your concerns.
My responses.
I’m a community activist. I love and work for my community. We take care of us.
Then in addition to all the love and mutual aid you do in your community, GET VACCINATED, so you don’t become an unwitting spreader of illness. That’s an important way to love your community right now. Almost all the hospitalizations and deaths right now are unvaccinated people.
I’m a hardcore anti-Big Pharma, Take-Down-the-Man radical organizer and getting a vaccine is the equivalent of giving up.
GET VACCINATED so you don’t have to die from what is now a preventable death and get back to work taking down the Man and organizing against Big Pharma. Organize to OPEN THE PATENTS to the vaccine, because our communities in the Global South are still dying and want unlimited access so they can stop dying. Dying from COVID is ugly and no fun. #PeoplesVaccine
You’re just a tool of Western Medicine.
Nope. I was raised in Ayurveda and Western Medicine; I benefit from, practice, and am supported by many kinds of medicine. I use science as it serves and leave it where it doesn’t. I got vaccinated so I wouldn’t spread it to YOU when you or your family members got sick and ended up hospitalized where I would have the pleasure of taking care of you. I got vaccinated to protect the people in my community who can’t be vaccinated, because I’m a community health worker. And I’m here to serve.
But there’s a microchip.
No. Stop. GET VACCINATED.
But it will reprogram my DNA.
Nope. It won’t do that either. It’s mRNA, which your immune system will break up in a matter of two weeks. GET VACCINATED.
But I can’t just take this horse deworming medicine and call it a day?
NO. Ivermectin is dangerous and people are showing up with poisoning right now. Worse, it delays arrival to care and we see that with COVID, the quicker you get into care, the less likely you are going to develop severe COVID So instead of poisoning yourself with horse parasite medicine, GET VACCINATED.
But The Man is trying to control us.
YES, through misinformation. Don’t buy it. If you’re from an oppressed community, GET VACCINATED because this virus sets off a more severe inflammatory response the more oppressed you community is. Aside from the important things you can do together to build more community immunity through organizing, mutual aid and taking control of food/medicine/shelter, you can also GET VACCINATED so no one has to die as you work to build a better future.
But Western Medicine has failed us and I don’t trust it.
YES, it has and it continues to because it must be decolonized. There are folks on the inside and outside working on this, and we want to be sure you don’t fall while we continue the collective work. So please GET VACCINATED.
But I like herbal medicines and can support my immunity.
YES, support your immunity with plant medicines AND take in the information to see what naive immune systems do in the face of this virus. Build up your health and your immunity. And GET VACCINATED.
Vaccines are just colonizer science.
Nope. My ancestors developed a prototype, in 1,000 BC with the purposeful infection of a small amount of smallpox to induce immunity. Our people were hella smart. Our sciences have been coopted. Don’t let yourself die or get debilitated from the virus while being miseducated about where these techniques come from.
Our Black, brown and Indigenous community healthcare workers are there to walk you through this. We love you. We got you. But we can’t help you when you’re in the ICU getting ready to bite the tube. So please, GET VACCINATED.
Dr. Rupa Marya is a hospital physician at UCSF, bandleader of Rupa and the April Fishes, and author, with Raj Patel, of the new book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.
