A Marion County Commissioner made an impassioned plea to the community to get the COVID-19 vaccine, saying if government hadn’t provided the vaccine, “people would be clamoring for it.”
Marion County Commissioner Craig Curry, who was elected to his seat to replace David Moore last year, made the comments during the Marion County Board of County Commissioners regular meeting on Tuesday, August 3.
Curry, who described his bout with COVID-19 last year as “10 days of hell,” shared his belief that individuals should consider getting vaccinated for themselves and for their communities, drawing parallels to the country’s approach with “polio and small pox.”
Curry said we’d “still be dealing with” those diseases had vaccines not been widely available.
“Society is going to be vaccinated one way or the other. We’re either going to do it voluntarily, with the vaccines that are available. Or we’re going to do it with herd immunity, and that’s kind of what’s going on across the country now,” said Curry.
Curry suggested that if “government had not provided the vaccine,” residents would be “yelling from the mountaintops that we didn’t do our job.”
“President Trump did a great job in a short period of time to produce vaccines that can solve this problem,” said Curry.
Curry made the remarks after Deputy Secretary Mark Lander of the Florida Department of Health in Marion County provided commissioners with an update on the county’s COVID-19 numbers.
Lander indicated that the positivity rate is the highest it has ever been and suggested that the vast majority of new cases were coming from residents that are unvaccinated.
The county’s latest data available shows 55% of “eligible” Marion County residents have been vaccinated. All residents over the age of 12 are considered eligible.
“If you’re unvaccinated, you should not be in a large crowd right now,” said Lander during Tuesday’s meeting. He says that the vaccine is the “biggest preventer of COVID-19” and “most effective tool” in fighting the virus.