Last week, a friend of mine made a snide comment along the lines of, “You know the COVID vaccine still works if you don’t post a photo of getting it, right?”

Someone replied, “Haha, but pics or didn’t happen, right?”

That’s not what those photos are about.

I am grateful and honored to be among the first people to get one of the new vaccines, as are my coworkers. We’re posting photos because we’re acutely aware of helping lead the way in one of the largest mass vaccination campaigns in recent history.

If our photos of our CDC cards, our smiling eyes and masked faces with needles in our arms, and our written messages of how we feel can help convince anybody to get one of the vaccines when they become available, then great!

COVID vaccination will need a LOT of public buy-in to be effective, and we’re posting publicly about our experiences to encourage that buy-in.

So it’s not about social media likes or “pics or it didn’t happen,” it’s about leveraging what platforms we have to magnify efforts to improve life for all of us.

And the more of us who do it, the better. Same goes for conversations amongst leery peers.