Dear editor:

I was talking to my daughter the other day. She told me her husband and my 3-year-old great-granddaughter were both recovering from Covid. (Needless to say, I'm relieved Covid has mutated away from its earlier, more deadly strains.) I asked her if they'd been vaccinated. She said, "The baby's too young, and my husband has to wait three months after getting sick before he can have a vaccination." That was a long way of saying no, they hadn't.

I later checked with the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to find that infants as young as 6 months old should be vaccinated for Covid, and that the only reason to wait three months after infection before vaccination was that it was unlikely an individual would get sick so soon after having been ill.

I told her about a friend of ours, an elderly woman who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. As a young child, she had a sister who died of whooping cough. "That was the olden days, dad," my daughter said. If she'd thought about it at all, she would realize that there are only two differences between "the olden days" and today. First, extreme measures can be taken, not available in 1940, to keep sick people alive in the Intensive Care Unit. Second, vaccines didn't exist for things like whooping cough, measles or polio (and now Covid).

The president-elect wants to put a vaccine denier in charge of the CDC. I wrote Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) about that, asking whether he would vote to confirm that person. He wrote back with a politician's answer about focusing on voter priorities and the president having a strong cabinet. There was a time when Sen. Barrasso was Dr. Barrasso — I would think he'd want to protect people from preventable life-threatening infection, but I guess Washington does things to people.

I suppose one could make a connection between the phrase "Make America Great Again" and the saying "That which doesn't kill  me only makes me stronger." Weed out the weak, perhaps? But a lot of remarkable Americans died during that first Covid outbreak ...