Are you Team AstraZeneca or Team Pfizer? The ridiculous rise of vaccine loyalty
Name: Vaccine loyalty. Age: Even newer than the vaccine selfie. Just remind me. Hello?! A selfie, as you’re getting it, in the arm. Surely you …
Obvs. Which did you have? Oxford/AstraZeneca, and very chuffed I was, too …. Ha! It’s the Harry Potter tribes all over again! Which makes you Slytherin, boo! Eat death, Death Eater..
Slytherin? What? Which did you have? #TeamPfizer! Yay! Gryffindor.
Hang on, we are talking about lifesaving vaccines in a global pandemic. Why the Harry Potter fixation? Someone quoted in the New York Times compared the which-vaccine-you-get lottery to the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts.
Who did? Just a guy, by the name of David Thomas, in Plymouth, Michigan. That’s not the point.
And what is the point? Vaccine loyalty.
Is that really a thing? Surely the best vaccine is any that is available. Take a look at Ellyn Marsh.
Who she? Broadway actor. Also TikTokker. She posted a video in which she’s pretending to be in a club, boasting smugly over the music which vaccine she got. Nearly a quarter of a million likes so far.
And which did she have? It doesn’t matter … OK, Gryffindor. Call her Hermione Granger if you like.
Would that make Moderna the
Hufflepuff ? Maybe. And Johnson & Johnson the other one I can never remember.
Ravenclaw. OK, but we need more than one TikTok video and a bloke in Michigan for me to believe in vaccine loyalty. How about people getting
T-shirts emblazoned with the tribes they’ve joined? There is a shop on Etsy called ViralMerchCo where you can buy different coloured tees and sweats with things like “Moderna” written over a picture of a patriotic bald eagle carrying a syringe. Or “Pfizer Alumni, Est 2021”.
I guess it is perfectly natural after finding out that someone has just been jabbed to ask which they got? And if something has potentially saved your life, you might feel a certain affection – attachment even – towards it. The New York Times has even coined a term for the merch.
And that term is? Pharmcore.
What about the people in places such as Germany and Botswana where the percentage vaccinated is much lower than in the UK and the US? Exactly – that’s a more important issue. When the world is jabbed, then let global pharmcore spread.
Do say:[Rolls up sleeve] “Come on then, Lord Voldemort: hit me with your Sputnik V.”
Don’t sing: [Sarcastically, to the tune of Weasley Is Our King from Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix] “Astra cannot save a thing/ It does not build immunity / That’s why #TeamModerna sing / Astra is our King.”