Myth Dispelled by Adam Possner—National Poetry Month 2023

Physician/poet Adam Possner, MD in his office.

Physician/poet Dr. Adam Possner addressed the anxiety and misinformation about the safety of vaccines that was growing and spreading even before the Coronavirus pandemic which was fueled by pseudo-scientific bullshit, social media, and credulous celebrities.

Possner said that his life path can be categorized neatly in three different ways—the personal, the medical, and the poetic.  He was born in Florida, grew up in Kentucky, and settled down in North Bethesda, Maryland.  He has been married for 16 years and has two young boys. He went to medical school at the University of Michigan, residency and chief residency at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, taught at George Washington University, and established his own private practice in January 2021.

Possner  had no formal training in poetry. In medical school that he discovered the poetry section in the Journal of the American Medical Association and began his foray into medical poetry. Soon after, he went through a several-year period in which he was very prolific.

Myth Dispelled

The flu vaccine cannot

give you the flu, I tell him.

It’s dead virus, there’s

nothing alive about it.

It can’t make you sick.

That’s a myth.

 

But if we bury it in

the grassy knoll

of your shoulder,

an inch under the stratum

corneum, as sanctioned by

your signature

in a white-coated ceremony

presided over by

my medical assistant

and then mark the grave

with a temporary

non-stick headstone,

the trivalent spirit

of that vaccine

has a 70 to 90 percent

chance of warding off

the Evil One,

and that’s the God’s

honest truth.

 

—Adam Possner

Adam Possner, MD Myths Dispelled. © 2012 Adam Possner, MD.