To jab or not to jab

We had an interesting conversation at home last week.

The topic just happened to be: Would you take the COVID19 vaccine if you had the opportunity? Various members of our household expressed conflicting views, but when it came to my turn, I replied: “It depends.” They countered: “On what?” “It depends on the vaccine’s provenance.”

See I don’t fancy acting as a guinea pig for some half-arsed Chinese drug company’s cutprice so-called COVID antidote… no thank you. But, if it’s a guaranteed properly tried and tested vaccine, produced by Oxford University or the bona fide Anglo Swedish company AstraZeneca, then I’ll be the first in the queue.

Another thing, we don’t yet know what type of vaccine it’s going to be. Will it be a live, non attenuated dose? Unlikely. Will it be an attenuated live vaccine? Probably. Or can we expect a vaccine cultured from dead material? Highly unlikely.

Attenuated vaccines are made from, in this case, viruses which have been “weakened” so that they create a protective immune response but do not cause disease in healthy people. These are the vaccines that various drug companies have been developing since COVID-19 first raised its ugly head in Wuhan, China, late last year.

I’m not going to get into whose fault the whole pandemic is. Suffice it to say: at the start of the spread of this extremely contagious virus in China, anyone could take a plane from Hubei province to the rest of the world, but not to Beijing, Shanghai or anywhere else in mainland China. Strange that… or not?

Of course we don’t know for certain how the vaccine is to be administered yet. We assume it will be via an injection into the muscle tissue of the upper arm, but it might just as easily be given orally or by means of a nasal spray. Let’s assume for the moment that it will be intramuscular, that’s fine by me, but there are a lot of people who quake at the prospect of any sort of injection – and at the dentist’s would rather be rendered unconscious rather than submit to the dreaded needle. How will they be vaccinated? Or would they prefer to take their chances and go among us as possible super-infectors?

I had an aunt, who has long since departed for that needlefree nirvana in the sky, who would rather have suffered intolerable pain rather than submit to, for her, the equally unendurable agonies of a jab. She claimed that even the sight of a hypodermic syringe made her feel faint. Mind you, she was the sort of person who came over a bit queasy when somebody swatted a fly in her presence.

And it’s not just doddery old ladies that go weak at the knees at the prospect of an injection. I knew a guy who was a medical officer in the British navy. He told me he frequently came across six foot plus matelots who fainted clean away when about to come into close contact with a hypodermic.

I am none too anxious to get spiked myself, but if it means a good degree of immunity from, what is turning out to be, a very unpleasant pandemic, then I’ll grit my teeth and bear it. Who but a complete fool would not?