Where’s My Lyme Vaccine?
Here’s a fun game I’ve played with fellow woodsgoing types over the years: How much would you pay to get vaccinated against Lyme disease? I generally settle on a number in the three or even low four figures. That’s a lot for my budget—a good chunk of a month’s mortgage payment—but would be worth it to eliminate the twinges of anxiety I feel about being outside, an activity that is otherwise No. 1 in my book. Without a Lyme vaccine on the market, this question is purely hypothetical, of course. But I’m not alone in the moderate-but-still-painful lengths I’d go to get one—a colleague recently confessed to trying to convince a vet acquaintance to give her a canine Lyme shot. (Yes, dogs can get Lyme vaccines, while humans cannot.) I think she was kidding!
I’ve been playing the what-would-you-do-for-a-Lyme-vax game more frequently this year, as my friends and I have spent most of our social time bushwhacking along the sides of overgrown creeks while our kids run wild. This was also the year we made unlikely folk heroes of giant pharmaceutical companies, proudly bragging about having Pfizer or Moderna or J&J coursing through our veins. A little subculture of vax positivity rose up to celebrate Americans’ collective quasi-liberation from COVID, because the COVID vaccine, like no other vaccine we’ve ever taken, directly fixed a big problem in our lives.
