€25 to get armour against a killer disease is not to be sneezed at

IT WAS an impulse purchase, let’s be honest. The man in my life became briefly insufferable about all the diseases he could not get because of all the vaccinations he’d had, so I decided to take a prescription out of his book, so to speak, and get the flu jab.

When I rang the pharmacy in Baldoyle, where I’d been told a sign in the window announced the availability of the flu jab, they said no bother, you just arrive at twelve and bring your PPS number.

So I duly arrived at twelve. “PPS number?” Conor the pharmacist asked, pen poised over a form. Rather than tell him I’d forgotten it, I did the privacy bristle.

You know the privacy bristle? It requires a slaty look and formal, not to say pompous, syntax. “Perhaps you’d enlighten me on why, precisely, you would require such a personal detail?” I suggested.

Conor the pharmacist took the privacy bristle in his stride. “It allows us to check,” he said helpfully.

“Check what?” I demanded, not willing to relinquish a good bristle without a fight.

“Well, if we go into the system, we might find with an elderly person that they’ve already had the flu jab but didn’t remember, you now?” Conor the pharmacist is clearly going to go places.

What a charmer, talking about elderly people as though neither of us was within striking distance of the category and giving the impression, as he did, that the two of us were in our thirties, whereas only one of us had been there in a long, long time, and that was him.

I phoned a friend (the long-suffering Stephanie) and the number was texted to me within minutes.

I handed it over and he went off to consult with his computer, leaving me with a form. The form invited me to confess if I was allergic to any of the ingredients in the flu vaccine. Just in case I didn’t know all of them by first name and off by heart, stuck to the table was a laminated list of those ingredients, including A/California/7/2009 (H1N1) pdm09.

Since I’ve never had an allergic reaction to anything, I figured I was safe from that one. The form went on to tell me that the ingredients, or at least some of them, had been propagated in fertilised hens’ eggs from healthy chicken flocks. It would never have occurred to me to ask where they were propagated. Nor would it have occurred to me that anybody would fertilise this stuff in eggs barren as a brick laid by dirty, drug-addicted chickens suffering from the pox.

But, once I was forced to think about it, I was properly grateful to the healthy flocks and just a little anxious as to what happened to the eggs afterwards. Conor the pharmacist returned from the computer with another form, this one showing me as living where I lived five years previously.

He sorted out the details and then scrubbed up like he was going to do brain surgery on me. “You do know you’ll have to stay here for fifteen minutes afterwards?” he asked, petroleum-gel-shiny hands in the air.

“In case I faint?” I asked. Fainting, as it turned out, was not the issue, post-vaccination. The issue is the teeny tiny, remote-as-hell possibility, if the wind happened to be in the wrong direction, that you just might get a small touch of anaphylactic shock.

But I’d be only grand, even if I swelled up with that, he reassured me, showing me his stocks of adrenalin. He had enough to cure me and dozens like me, if the remote diseased chickens came home to roost.

Then he stuck a needle filled with vaccination in me, I paid twenty-five euro, hung around for another ten minutes or so and got into the car, where, on the radio, someone was getting fierce worked up about ebola sufferers from Liberia not fessing up to having had any contact with the virus for fear it kept them off the plane headed for America.

Now, I’m as willing to worry in a promiscuous way as the next, but the fact is that, if you are staying in Ireland from now until spring, your chances of picking up ebola and dying from it are minuscule. Your chances of picking up influenza and dying from it are much higher. Particularly if you are over sixty, have been or still are a smoker, or are immune-compromised in any one of the myriad of ways possible these days.

You can, however, eliminate your risk with a brisk dose of constructive selfishness. (Even counting the time taken hanging around to see if I swelled up in reaction to something that escaped the clean robust chickens, the entire procedure took twenty- five minutes.)

It’s painless and you’re left with a little roundy plaster and an upper arm that knows its had an injection. Some people don’t have to pay for it, but even if you don’t qualify to get the jab gratis, and even if Michael Noonan doesn’t make nice next week, the fact is that twenty five quid for armour against a killer disease has to be an economic proposition. For you. And for your family.

Covered in post-jab virtue, it struck me that, as we face into the winter with the Met Office producing yellow alerts, counting trolleys in A&E is going to become the usual minor-key worry-note every day, every week. Even without a flu epidemic, the numbers are going to go up, as inevitably they do at this time of the year. The human misery and the pressure on medical staff are old but infinitely reiterated news.

The good news is that everyone who gets a flu jab reduces their chances of getting up close and personal with a trolley, although falling downstairs and or drinking yourself stupid will put you in that position, even if you’re full of vaccine from squeaky-clean chickens.

Not only that, but the more of us who get vaccinated, the more we reduce the pool of possible infection (or contagion, I’m not that sure which is which) thereby keeping even the unvaccinated somewhat safer and reducing the crowding in our acute hospitals and, as a result, the cost to the health system that’s giving Leo Varadkar warts at the moment.

I’m a bit late this year, but next year I think I’ll put in a pre-budget submission calling for a tax credit for every citizen who can produce a vaccination cert. In addition, companies providing flu vaccination programmes on their own premises would also get a tax break as would sports clubs and other places where people gather together and might otherwise infect each other. The immediate and long-term cost saving to the state would be enormous.

In the meantime, however, your GP or your local Conor the pharmacist are only egging to vaccinate you, using vaccine produced by laundered flocks of revoltingly healthy chickens.