There’s been a spike in ‘jab-jealousy’ in my area
Back in December, when we were still vaccine newbies, out of curiosity I typed my age into some app to find out how long I would have to wait for the jab. The reply read something like this: “You are 11,784,000th in the queue. Please hold the line. Your arm is important to us.”
It was a daunting line before me, but I wasn’t that fussed. I was just happy to see my mother and her friends getting the protection that they needed.
Or so I thought. Lately, I have been experiencing distinct twinges of what I am ashamed to identify as “jab jealousy”. It began when a friend told me that her twentysomething daughter had had her vaccine.
“Hang on a minute! Just because your daughter has an office job in the NHS, nowhere near a hospital, how come she merits an early vaccine?”
I didn’t say that, of course. I’m sure the girl was thoroughly deserving… No, actually, I’m not sure. How come she got lucky when I had just heard from an 86-year-old reader in Somerset who was upset not to have had the call?
I felt a bit better when a very good-natured friend who has been shielding since March grumbled that a friend of hers, “who only has asthma”, had been vaccinated while she was still waiting. Surely a congenital lung disease trumps common or garden asthma? Hmmph!
In the film Contagion, which I rashly watched the other night, people start killing each other over some quack herbal remedy for a deadly plague. Things haven’t got that bad in East Anglia, but there has been some jab-upmanship because the Oxford/astrazeneca one can make you feel headachey for a day or two, while there are seemingly no side effects with the Pfizer one. But everyone still wants the former because it went to Oxford.
The rollout has now reached the large and more demanding middle-aged cohort. Feelings are running high. “Can Group 6 book on the national system now?” fumed one man on social media. “Thought it was only over 65s?”
The Archbishop of Canterbury got people’s backs up when he said he’d had the vaccine early as a “key worker”, even though churches have been shut. Members of his flock muttered that he should have put more deserving cases first.
It all gets a bit Darwinian in my patch after someone discovers our GPS have been told to prioritise the vulnerable under-64s over the healthy over-64s. Naturally, your columnist will patiently await her turn while reserving the right to seethe quietly at anyone her age who sneaks in early. Meanwhile, Himself has been tipped off about excess doses at the Excel centre and plans to “just happen to be passing”.
Turns out that the one thing you can’t inoculate against is human nature.