THE CASE
My best friend and I were walking in Golden Gate Park last weekend, both of us wearing our masks. We stopped to listen to a musician playing by the side of the road, and I turned to my friend, saying “I am so glad I got vaccinated so that we can be safe! It’s so nice to go out, be with people and finally be able to enjoy some level of normalcy!”
She looked at me and said, “You’re crazy if you think the vaccine is going to help you! Haven’t you read all of the news about the variants?”
“Oh, give me a break, what variants?” I said, knowing she was a little prone to internet hype.
She replied, “There’s a ton of them! First there was one in England, then Brazil, and now it’s the Delta variant. They’re coming from everywhere in the world and the vaccines don’t do anything to stop them! They’re super contagious and even people that are vaccinated are getting infected. They’re calling them breakthrough infections. I read that it’s some sort of mutation in the dumb spike protein, and that’s what the vaccine hits. What’s even the point of getting vaccinated if you’re still going to get COVID? It seems like no matter what we do to stop it, the virus will just mutate around it.”
It sounded like she knew what she was talking about. But everyone is still saying we should get the vaccine. I had so many questions… Where could I find the right answers?
THINK: What do you already know about the ideas in the dialog above? What do you not know?
ASK QUESTIONS! Write down a list of questions that you need to answer in order to respond to your friend.
RESEARCH: Spend time searching for evidence from credible web sources to get answers to your questions. BE SKEPTICAL! We’ve provided a few resources to get you started, but feel free to find new sources on your own! How do you decide if a source is reliable?
WRITE: Write and submit an argument that USES EVIDENCE to confirm or refute the idea that the vaccine is useless because the virus will just mutate.
include at least three pieces of EVIDENCE as to why you believe the vaccine WILL or WILL NOT be made useless by virus mutations.
include a source for EACH piece of evidence you present
at the end of your argument, write three QUESTIONS about biology that you are now WONDERING about or have CONFUSIONS about after doing this assignment.
