Vaccinate to protect those you love! Vaccinations are not only about "you"!

Get vaccinated! For the common good! Protect your family!

How to talk about vaccines - check this World Health Organization poster series here.

Echo plea published in the News Advance a Virginia newspaper.

Many people, including me, got vaccinated against COVID-19 to help protect our whole community against illness, hospitalization and death and to stop the virus from multiplying and mutating into a more infectious or more deadly form. Getting vaccinated prevented us from causing someone else to become sick. While I am protected against hospitalization and death, I could still be a spreader.

Now we have the delta variant which spreads much more easily. So we who are vaccinated wear masks to protect those who are not vaccinated.

There is still time for everyone to do their part. If you are not yet vaccinated, please consider getting vaccinated to protect others and reduce that chances of another more deadly variant from emerging. Working together we can make our community safer, allow schools to operate in-person, support the full reopening of businesses and to put the pandemic behind us. But everyone needs to pitch in.

To all who are vaccinated or soon will be vaccinated, thank you.

To others, please consider - and receive a vaccine- for the health of your neighbors. Thank you.

Molly McClenon, Lynchburg Virginia

Echo from Virginia - Donald Trump is pathetic

This echo letter to the editor was published in the News Advance, a newspaper reporting in Lynchburg Virginia.

A president in love with authoritarians....immature behavior and very odd actions concerning foreign leaders....

Donald Trump obviously is infected with dictator envy

America's Founding Fathers risked everything to overthrow tyranny, giving important powers to the emerging idea of elected legislatures to check misuse of power.

Donald Trump clearly wants to be dictator. He coyly hints at a third term which would break his oath to defend the Constitution but then his word means nothing. He cannot grasp compromise and power sharing and rages against Congress and other “enemies” because they aren’t his Big Rubber Stamp. He openly envies and praises the powers held by foreign dictators, obviously jealous.

The American public employs Trump, and the American public has every right to know all about him. His whole life is a cover up where, for years, armies of lawyers weaseled him out of contracts, loans and other personal and financial obligations, Financial records would indicate with whom he is still entwined, some being foreign entities.

He cannot effectively separate the presidency from his own self interests and shuns transparency. But the public has a right to know this information and the powers of Congress exist for that purpose. He has never had a meaningful acquaintance with responsibility, truth, respect, honor, morality, integrity, philanthropy, dignity, statesmanship or ethics. To him, that is for weak sissies. 

Trump will lie and cheat to get his way.

His staunchest apologists continue to twist logic, reason and reality to defend him. Trump uses lies and cheap carnival tactics because it plays to the ignorant and fires up the unthinking. No meaningful leadership, just ongoing nasty, petty, vindictive, confrontational temper tantrums. No stable person has to act so relentlessly childish to convince others of their worth. Pathetic.

He turns events which should unite people into self promotions with distorted views to feed his corrosive ego, which hides a profoundly insecure being who bolsters himself with constant “look at me” stunts.
His latest contamination turned the Washington area’s nonpartisan Fourth of July festivities into a political and very partisan rally illegally paid for, in part, with public money diverted from more pressing public needs and not even part of his fake national emergency.Why aren’t Republicans protecting the taxpayer? If a Democrat in that office did this they would scream to high heaven. Hypocrisy, pure and simple. German politicians thought they could control Hitler. Blind partisanship never ends well.

Trump’s lack of transparency, immature behavior and very odd actions concerning foreign leaders clearly suggest something amiss, which the public, as represented by Congress, has every right to investigate. He just cannot grasp that he is a public servant ... an employee and not a private citizen. He puts this nation at risk every single day and then just tells selected audiences what they wish to hear. That, in this hair trigger world, is dangerous.
 

From Elizabeth Paull, Amherst Virginia