pandemics — Deep Times — Leonardo Ambasciano

On 20 August 2021 I got vaccinated.

I asked the doctor at the vaccination centre about adverse reactions. The doctor hastily explained the potential side effects to me. I was far from being satisfied but then again I am quite the realist. In 2006 I was run over by a car while crossing the street on a zebra crossing and with the pedestrian green light on – as a result, I think I have an intuitive grasp of the unmerciful nature of statistics. In any case, it’s not rocket science: better to bet on a vaccine doing its work than risking death or some lifelong organ damage by catching a nasty bug. I gave my consent and the nurse proceeded to give me three jabs on both arms that granted me immunisation against diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, and chickenpox.

Three days earlier, a 20+ year high-school friendship crumbled and disintegrated because the friend in question had embraced nasty no-vax beliefs.

One month earlier, I had my second Comirnaty (Pfizer BioNTech) Covid-19 vaccine shot.

Two months earlier, a relative told her oncologists that she did not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19 because she “wasn’t ready to die.”

And then, I suffered a complete breakdown.

But let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

The response by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his team to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been dismal. On 12 March, I had to endure possibly one of the most cringeworthy political speeches of recent history, when Johnson addressed the nation to tell its citizens that despite the fact that “many more families [were] going to lose loved ones before their time” (meaning the elderly), there was basically nothing to do in terms of prevention (Stewart, Proctor and Siddique 2020). Johnson’s statement was mind-boggling for a variety of reason, the most astounding of which was that the core Tory electorate is currently made up of older people (Inman 2019). You get what you vote for, I guess (Walker 2020), but is a selective culling of the elderly really what elderly Conservative voters voted for during the recent national election?

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