When is a vaccine NOT a vaccine?

EVERY day, my phone reminds me of photos I’ve either taken or had sent to me via its “on this day” feature.

The oldest snaps are generally from beer garden knees-ups, meals, birthdays and old family get-togethers.

Then we skip through 2018/19 and into 2020/21. And I cringe. Images of shop floor markings suddenly fill my screen.

“Stand two metres apart!” we were ordered by teenage supermarket assistants. And instead of telling them to go f**k themselves, we just meekly obeyed.

“Wash your hands while singing happy birthday!” was another one.

There are pictures of the missus in a face mask, or everyday household snaps casually featuring bottles of hand sanitiser on the sideboard.

We couldn’t, of course, hug anyone outside of our bubble.

Shaking hands was also a big no-no, but elbowing each other, like we were all paraplegics, was fine.

Substantial

We were forced to spend money we didn’t have on a “substantial meal” we didn’t want just so we could have a pint or two.

That pint, of course, had to be finished by 10pm because after that, it seemed, COVID turned into a pumpkin.

Before we had even sat down, we had to inform the Government, via a QR code, where we were and who we were with.

Just before they finally did close all the restaurants and bars and sandwich shops and high streets and offices and airports and railways, we did have one other option.

“Eat out to help out,” where for every meal out you paid for, the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak would pay for another.

Meaning at least one of the reasons the country is now bankrupt was so we could further feed people who in general look like they could survive a winter’s hibernation and still live.

Some of us took to our doorsteps every Thursday evening at 8pm to clang saucepans together, until we collectively realised that we’d taken complete leave of our senses and stopped, almost overnight.

Our roads, pavements, seas, lakes, rivers and hedgerows became scourged by masses of discarded blue face masks, which we now know were only slightly more useful than useless, and even that’s up for debate.

Then along came the vaccines and lo! We were saved!

Once more we could run gaily along the street doing whatever we liked…

Except, of course, we could not, not least because those same roads and pavements were now patrolled by paranoid mask addicts convinced that the world would end if they removed them. Then came the inevitable. We knew that coronavirus was dangerous to those already vulnerable, mainly the elderly and those with existing “underlying health problems” – code for being too fat, too old or asthmatic, or all three.

But then it turned out that the vaccines weren’t exactly what they were cracked up to be, either.

According to Wikipedia, a vaccine is “a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease”.

Yet unlike the smallpox vaccine, which stops people getting smallpox, the COVID-19 vaccines did not and still do not prevent people from catching it.

Nor do the vaccines prevent you from spreading it to others.

Just ask American President Joe Biden, who’s had more jabs than a pin cushion, who is surrounded by quintuple-vaccinated secret services agents, and who STILL keeps getting it.

And then there’s that dramatic rise in “sudden unexplained deaths”, particularly in otherwise healthy young men, that the powers-that-be would prefer we ignored...

So what did I learn from my “on this day” interlude? Simple. To never again listen to anyone, anywhere, about anything… EVER.