Below is the full, unedited text of a story describing the experiences of a woman iwith employer-enacted vaccine mandates during the Covid era. Please contact Covid Stories Archive if you would like to use or reproduce this essay, in whole or in part, for your research or writing. Also, please consider sharing your own stories for preservation in our archive.
What to say of two years that seem like two decades? I was employed as a contract faculty in a university, I was making a good income and, more importantly, I had drug coverage through my employer. See, I have multiple sclerosis and my medication is quite expensive and I wouldn’t be able to afford it if I didn’t have drug coverage. Then COVID hit and by the following year my employer had introduced mandatory vaccination. But I could not accept to be coerced into taking a drug that is not a vaccine and is still in its experimental phase (I know about testing drugs because I volunteered to test one for the treatment of MS and it took over a decade before it was approved). My life is already precarious because of MS, I am not willing to play Russian roulette with it just to make politicians and Pharma executives happy. So I lost my job. And my husband lost his (he was working in healthcare). It hurts pretty bad economically, but I can look at my face in the mirror every morning and I am not ashamed. I didn’t kneel to the golden calf of Big Pharma. I held the line. And no matter what happens, it was worth it. My body is my temple and, as someone once wrote, the temple is sacred because it’s not for sale.
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