Bet the fratboys would line up around the block if the nurse giving vaccines looked like this
Because of the typical college lifestyle — cramped and crowded living conditions, lack of sleep, poor diet and frequency of random hookups — students are among the highest risk groups for contracting the swine flu. They’re even more likely to die from it.
But the vast majority say they won’t be getting a vaccine this year, a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found: seven out of ten Americans aged 18 to 29 say they won’t heed physicians warnings to get immunized.
Could it be because of the sense of invincibility young people are said to feel? Perhaps, if you’re judging by the answers these douchey GW fratboys gave to the Washington Post.
“I don’t need it,” said Sal Marchesano, 21, a senior. “They would have to come here to give me the shot. No. They would have to come to my room. When I’m free.”
[Matt] Stratton, a junior who said he wants to be a doctor, lives by a classic collegiate dictum — carpe diem, or seize the day. “There are any number of things I do,” he said. “I cross the street when the light’s not green. We’re talking about going skydiving.”
Or maybe YouTube has something to do with it. A video featuring Washington Redskins cheerleader Desiree Jennings, who has suffered from a rare neurolgical disorder believed to have been triggered by the swine flu shot she received, has gone viral. Black activist Louis Farrakhan posted an ominous video warning the American people that the vaccine is part of a dastardly plot to gut the worlds population.
“The Earth can’t take 6.5 billion people,” Farrakhan said recently at an event in Memphis commemorating the 14th anniversary of the Million Man March in Washington.
“We just can’t feed that many. So what are you going to do? Kill as many as you can. We have to develop a science that kills them and makes it look as though they died from some disease.”
Either way, the young’s blasé outlook on the disease has experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrambling to find a reason. The most typical response to their surveys? Young people think the media has overblown the crisis.
Our bad.