It’s time for public health vaccine messaging to focus less on what getting jabbed means for society, and more on what not getting vaccinated can mean for individuals. In other words, it’s time to get disgusting. Anti-smoking campaigns and anti-drug campaigns have used upsetting medical descriptions and imagery in public service announcements. Why not go there with COVID?

On the Reddit forum r/nursing, there are no reporters in full hair and makeup standing with a hospital in the background; the real horror of COVID is in clear, grotesque focus. Nurses trade stories of COVID patients with maggots in their sinus cavities, of something called “COVID poop” which apparently causes sores for some patients on ventilators, of unvaccinated COVID-positive pregnant women who go into labor prematurely while intubated and die before they meet their infants—who now have to spend time in the NICU for a completely preventable reason.

Anecdotes of the horrors of COVID have analogs in the world of medical journals. Researchers have found that men who have had COVID are six times more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction. Research has shown that many COVID patients who end up intubated also end up suffering fungal infections.