Jabbed

Well, since you ask, so far all I feel is a little bit thick-headed but that could be due to a variety of causes. Mind you, it hasn't quite been twelve hours since I attended for my first vaccination, and there is plenty of time yet for some symptoms to kick in. 

The theatre in Guildford, adapted for the purpose, was impressively well-organised, the volunteers and staff thoroughly drilled in what they had to say but with the air of people who were buoyed through what otherwise might have been a boringly repetitious experience by the knowledge that they were making a difference. In fact, it struck me that there might have been slightly more there than strictly necessary, but at least you knew that you were never going to get lost and end up wandering around the wrong side of the building as you were never more than about twenty yards away from someone in a hi-vis jacket, smiling behind a face mask. Given my enviable ability, proven over long years, to misinterpret signs and instructions, this was probably all to the good.

I only know one vaccine-sceptic among my acquaintance, a warm-hearted gentleman I met through Ms DarkMorte and who believes - in so far as I understand what he believes - that the provision of vaccines is part of a long-laid and determined scheme by governments and tech companies to control our lives. He doesn't doubt that covid-19 is real, as he has had it himself, but is adamant that we are better off fighting it naturally rather than handing our futures over to those who mean us no good. He has sent me a link to a video on Youtube which I am reluctant to click on as it will be something that at first sounds reasonable until you check and realise where it's coming from. A few months ago it was the former Pfizer employee Michael Yeadon and his long-discredited arguments that the pandemic was over, that herd immunity had been achieved naturally and that there was no need for vaccines; now it's a personable young New Zealand doctor who rubbishes everything you think you know in great detail, and you find yourself rubbing your chin in doubt until you follow up the independent UK news website she recommends and discover it's a far-right fantasy network with links to Infowars in the States. 

It all sounds like it's driven by not wanting to accept the patent truth, and hunting round until you find the evidence that justifies the decision you made long before. It's a little different from such lockdown-sceptics as Lord Sumption who simply maintain that the damage done to our lives by measures taken against the pandemic is worse than a few hundred thousand people dying, and who am I to disagree because there is no answer to the point, as I wrote nearly a year ago. 

I rather wanted to be a lockdown-sceptic: not in the sense of believing that they don't work (how can reducing contact between human beings not reduce the impact of a disease that spreads by human contact?), but wanting to think the one here hadn't. For a short period in the late Spring of 2020 it looked from the figures as though that might have been the case, but it clearly wasn't, and I faced the fact that my scepticism, in this instance, was driven more by what I would have preferred to be true rather than what obviously was, and so I had to discard it. There's no suppressed truth, no great thing that we could have done, no secrets, no hidden agendas. Certainly there are people making the monetary best out of the conditions we all labour under, but such profiteering is pretty open, and always happens. No alternative story. There is only this, and getting through it as best we can.