I ran into a woman at the highway department recently who was standing outside the door talking to an elderly woman. The older woman had on a mask, but the younger woman did not.

We were waiting in line to get inside, and I couldn’t help but hear their coversation.

The younger woman was lecturing the older woman against being vaccinated against the coronavirus.

She said it wasn’t necessary because she was young, healthy and wouldn’t get it.

The older lady tried to explain to her the necessity of being vaccinated, but it was a fruitless effort. The young lady had taken a position early on in the pandemic, and there was no way to change her mind.

She didn’t want to even consider that she might be wrong.

Hospitals are beginning to fill up again. People are dying again. Doctors say that 99 percent of the new coronavirus patients are those who haven’t been vaccinated.

Why not?

We get vaccinated against measles, diptheria, polio, typhoid and many other diseases that can kill or cripple us. Although there are still some parents out there who have bought into the fiction that vaccinations cause autism, the majority of parents know that theory has been disproven.

Less than half of the eligible people in the state have chosen to protect themselves and others against the coronavirus.

That means that if you go into Walmart or any other business, more than 50 percent of the other people in the stores shopping without masks are not protected. So if they are carryig the virus and don’t know it, they are potentially infecting half the customers in the store.

My family has been vaccinated, for which I’m very thankful.

I remember the polio epidemic.

We were living in Barnwell, S.C., and Daddy was an engineer on the Savannah River Project, widely know as “the Bomb Plant.”

It was 1952, and I was very young, but I remember they closed the schools. Children in our neighborhood had polio.

A little girl I played with who lived two blocks away died.

There was no vaccine.

I mostly remember how frightened all the grownups were and how we all were kept closely at home.

Finally, when the vaccine was created and distributed, everybody was so thankful and everybody got vaccinated.

No one wanted their children to be crippled or to die.

We were safe.

So now, when people can be safe through vaccinations, it’s incomprehensible to me that they would choose not to take a step that can save their lives, or the lives of others.

If you can choose to live or choose to die, why would any rational person choose death? And though you may have the right as an individual to choose to die, do you really have the right through this choice to kill other people?

We’ve lost a neighbor to coronavirus, and even now one entire neighborhood household is sick.

Many of those who get sick and survive experience organ failure and are left with permanent respiratory damage.

Please don’t let this happen to you. Get vaccinated and save a life.