Today I got my first vaccine.
I lucked out with Pfizer, the first drug to climb the pandemic Everest. It had been around for the longest, so I was surfing the crest of a wave, enjoying one of mankind’s greatest achievements, up there with Mo Salah and the Moon landing.
But there’s a 'Coveat'.
The immunity afforded by a vaccine might wear off with time; the vaccine might not protect against those ghouls of the future, variants. COVID’s caveat bludgeons my hope with a familiar disappointment.
So why take the vaccine at all? Why not just wait to get naturally infected by COVID, with my 99% chance of survival, so I can develop my own antibodies?
According to my friend, an immunologist,
"I would definitely advise getting vaccinated ahead of natural immunity. Response to infection is very unpredictable: it could go anywhere from severe pneumonia with lung inflammation and ITU admission or death, to asymptomatic infection or a mild sore throat. Your immune response would be equally unpredictable and probably not very long-lasting or incomplete.
"The process behind making the vaccine is to basically identify those vaccine proteins that do not lead to inflammation and disease but at the same time trigger off a robust, long-lasting immune response.
"The Pfizer vaccine contains messenger RNA signals that will generate similar proteins and mimic the presence of the virus without all the mess of actually getting sick, and this leads to immunity."
So this ‘targeting’ acts like an e-mail—gives us a message, teaches us something new and gets thrown away. My fundamental reason for taking the vaccine was that my faith in science was stronger than my faith in its alternatives: I don’t want vulnerable people to die in hospital, and (to a certain degree) I accept the sacrifice of personal freedoms for the greater good.
Many of the people I love and trust have been vaccinated, and as yet no one has grown an extra head. I’m not comfortable with the lack of long-term studies, yet my rock-solid hatred of masks and a yearning for non-annoying travel outweigh my fear of the risks of vaccination.
As I sat in a shaded courtyard in Paola, awaiting my fizzy Pfizer, I reflected on how the tiny pain of an injection promised the return of hugs, and an end to the chronic loneliness of the pandemic year.
Once my ID had been checked I was shown into a small office, where a nice Indian nurse injected Pfizer into my shoulder muscle. I was grateful she didn’t twist the needle, like the PCR people twist the nasal swab, and also that she didn’t ‘miss’ the muscle, a mistake which may have explained the rare incidence of blood clots in the AstraZeneca jabs.
Very soon I was back out in the courtyard, feeling faintly heroic. I was fighting back against a common enemy. This is the nearest my generation have come to a war, and I was ‘playing my part’ in the effort. Now it was official: there was my name on the vaccine card, misspelt.
My arm was aching for the next two days. I may have been more tired than usual - hard to tell. I was looking forward to getting the second jab over and done with, and setting up my own HappyVax Supper Club. According to recent COVID Symptom Tracking Data in the UK, the chances of suffering from the virus after one dose of vaccine is 1 in 100,000, which goes down to 1 in 150,000 after two doses.
But there’s a Coveat. There’s always a Coveat.
While vaccines are slashing hospital admission rates, they won’t 100% stop you spreading the filthy disease. Yet ultimately, in the words of the immunologist, taking the vaccine "…is a no-brainer in the current climate."