Ninety-five-year-old Hugh McMillan doesn’t want to hear why you haven’t been vaccinated for COVID-19. The World War II and Central Intelligence Agency veteran says now is no time for excuses.

“Stay alive and keep your kids alive and keep your neighbors alive,” the longtime Key Peninsula resident said. “Get the shot.”

Just more than 50 percent of Pierce County residents are fully vaccinated, with more than 57 percent having received at least one dose. Though the county is on track to reach 1 million doses soon, hundreds of thousands of Pierce County residents remain vulnerable.

McMillan said reluctance for vaccine is “puzzling.” The misinformation surrounding vaccine irks him most.

“The evidence is there,” McMillan said. “But I keep hearing people come up with these cockamamie stories that the shot will make you sterile. Or the shot will put a chip in your body. That’s all horse pucky.”

McMillan is old enough to remember another pandemic that immobilized the nation.

“I go back a couple of years, as you know,” McMillan said. “And I remember as a 6-year-old, our country got whacked—as did the world—with a funny thing called polio.”

By the late 1940s, polio disabled an average of 35,000 Americans each year. But the polio vaccine arrived in 1955 and the United States hasn’t seen a case since 1979.

McMillan compared the disease that debilitated America then with the one doing it now.

“We successfully eradicated polio,” McMillan said. “And if people think this monstrous thing that is strangling our world right now, COVID-19, can’t be licked, they’re not thinking.”