Well, I got me a COVID-19 shot yesterday courtesy of two strong men, President Donald John Trump and Governor Ronald Dion DeSantis.  It was easy; painless; and, in a word, miraculous.

Think of it: just eight months after Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was announced, I will no longer have to depart at zero-cold-dark-thirty on Tuesdays in order to avoid contact with a crowd at Walmart as I shop for fresh essentials, I'll be able to go to the local Waffle House for breakfast, and I'll no longer have to fear when people get close to me.

I was in the company of, perhaps, ten times more people than I've been near in months.  It was nerve-wracking, but all of those people were there to get or to give what I've been desperately wanting for so long — peace and safety.  That peace and safety was afforded me by the aforementioned gentlemen, who, when they took their respective jobs, never knew that one of their most important actions and legacies would be the thwarting of the progression of a killer pandemic.

I was an early supporter of candidate Trump:

I am supporting Donald Trump given the alternatives[.] ... Trump, the man, is ... an honest, decent, talented person who [says] ... "I can get it done" ... he is a person that "manages to get things done."  He's the best manager the country's seen since Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca.  He sets priorities, hires the best people he can find, and tells them what to do and how he wants it done.  Then tells them that when they have problems with doing it they are to come to him and tell how he can help them solve the problem[.] ... One of the best-ever sports broadcasters, Warner Wolf, who's lived in two of his buildings says: "...he hires the best ... [and] will have the sense to hire right people[.]

I believe that, without Mr. Trump's intervention, NYC still would be trying to figure out how to solve the Wollman Rink problem.  Similarly, without Mr. Trump's intervention, President Harris would still be trying to get vaccines into citizens' arms a few years hence.

As most readers know, and without going into details, Mr. Trump tasked, and funded, people to search out and develop vaccines while also tasking and funding drug companies to begin and expand the manufacturing of millions of doses of the most promising candidates during the exhaustive, and required, testing and evaluating period.  He also tasked, and funded, the military to develop a plan to transport and distribute vaccines to states and centers immediately after approval of vaccines were granted.

Mr. Trump has left a long and substantial list of actions and accomplishments as he has left office, but OWS may ultimately be his greatest, for it will have saved countless lives, and we'll never again go back to the old ways of producing, developing, and distributing new vaccines for new viruses.

I was also an early, but unvoiced, supporter of Mr. DeSantis primarily because I simply liked the cut of his jib and the way he trimmed it.  The roll-out of Florida's vaccination program has validated that support.

The reason I write today is because, as I experienced it, this program seems to have been fully thought out and planned so that when the vaccines arrived, they got into the arms of the most important and vulnerable of us — healthcare workers, first responders, and codgers — as expeditiously as possible.

As soon as a link was made available, I clicked on it, followed the instructions, and waited for the next step.  I eventually got an email with instructions on how to make an appointment.  On arriving for that appointment, I and a bunch of other geezers were quickly led from point to point to out the door in much less than an hour, including the post-shot wait time in case of reaction.

Mr. DeSantis laterally set up a program with a supermarket chain to supplement the planned program.  It seems to be a bit awkward but functional, and we now have more than a dozen sites in my small county in westernmost Florida shooting hundreds of people a day.  They'll soon be closing for lack of existing targets!

Now, I'm not yet out of the tunnel, as it were, but that light I see is not Death riding on a train headed at me, but Hope holding a lantern at the end of it.  I'm still eighty-one years old and frail, but I now don't think the China Virus will be what puts me in the ground.

PS: It may be a bit premature to say that the progression of the virus will have been thwarted, for the virus is still mutating/developing, but, nevertheless, I remain optimistic.

The author is retired, his profile may be found on LinkedIn, and he usually responds to emails sent to ringchadburn@hotmail.com.

Photo credit: Blue Diamond Gallery, Nick Youngson, CC BY-SA 3.0, Alpha Stock Images.