Suzanne Harrington: Stick a needle in me, I'm done with Covid
Having been writing this column since the Napoleonic Wars, I can honestly say that 2020 wins as the surreal fountain that keeps on spouting. Soaking us in previously unexplored convo topics that a year ago would have had us stampeding for the exits, but this year has made us all amateur virologists, epidemiologists, and now vaccinologists. Never have we ever been so obsessed with microbes, and how to manage them. And finally, there seems to be a vaccination light at the end of the plague tunnel.
It’s the Usain Bolt of vaccines – they average twelve years to develop, the fastest ever being mumps, which took four. Thanks to the Christmas vaccine rush, the Covid one could – almost - be in our Christmas stockings. Perhaps in our Easter eggs. Good news, right?
We remain, however, globally suspicious. An Ipsos poll of 18,500 people from 15 countries published in The Economist revealed a drop in enthusiasm, with people less keen in October on getting vaccinated than they were in August. Only India remained steadily optimistic. Even in China, where collective compliance is baked in, vaccine enthusiasm dropped from 97% to 85%; in the US, where rampant individualism is equally baked in, only 64% were willing to get it. France was the least up for it, at 54%. Spain and Italy weren’t too keen either.
Side effects and rushed trials were cited as the main reasons, along with being low risk / non-vulnerable, and general opposition to vaccinations. Not necessarily anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists who believe Bill Gates wants to microchip our brains to enslave us (we already have smartphones for that), and who refer to the rest of the population as sheeple, but a wider population who are more generally cautious.
Fair enough. Back in the olden days – by which I mean 2019 - vaccinations were something kids got for measles and seniors got for flu, making it a bit more of a niche topic discussed mostly by new parents and old people. Now we are all talking about it, from to the hushed labs of Oxford to those howling about how we are all going to be held down and forcibly injected.
Personally, I’d undergo an anal probe if it meant that I could go to a packed, sweaty gig again. I’d have injections in both eyeballs if I could be in the middle of a football stadium, screaming and swaying in a crowd of thirty thousand. I’d happily ingest a test tube of plague if it meant being able to travel to see family.
Okay, maybe not happily, but you get what I mean. I am not pro-vax – I did not get my own kids vaccinated when they were small, waiting instead until there was an outbreak of polio and diphtheria at the end of our street. (It never materialised). I never get travel jabs for far-flung places, preferring to trust my own immunity. But if a Covid vaccination means being able to resume normal life, then stick a needle in me. My sleeve is rolled up.
