"The United States can always be relied upon to do the right thing — having first exhausted all possible alternatives," Winston Churchill once said (before adding: "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.")
But when it comes to this great country's Coronavirus response it could hardly be truer; after many months of paralyzing denials and mess-ups, when that other guy was in the White House, suddenly we're in overdrive. Almost 100,000,000 shots are "in arms", with over 54,000,000 fully vaccinated. However you add it up, the numbers are impressive.
Because of this, Texas threw open the doors to the pharmacies today (after throwing open the doors to the bars first) and everyone over 16 can now get the miracle vaccine! I assumed that lines would form around the block, and was happy to wait a few weeks while those more needful or desperate than me got jabbed, but no! I casually checked online this morning and got an appointment for the same afternoon.
Perhaps it's because everyone who wanted a vaccine has already got one. There have long been rumours of the more rural parts of the state giving it to whoever rode up, with Houstonians driving a few hours inland to search out the magic vials. In Houston, due to the...um...interesting way American healthcare is set up, if a hospital has given all high-risk people who need it a dose, anything left over is a free-for-all. Phone and e-mail chains involving someone's aunt whose neighbour's daughter is a nurse etc. have lit up, and some clinics have been swamped if word got around of vaccines going spare.
It may also be because of an anti-vaxx sentiment still floating about, where Bill Gates - not content with knowing everything because you already have Windows on your PC - is trying to put a microchip in you! This is to do with 5G mobile phone networks, but I don't understand that bit. The big question in America is whether shots are soon to be enforced because of the conspiracy madness, either by businesses or government (hiss!) insisting on vaccination certificates before granting you service.
Or maybe I just got lucky. It was in a pharmacy at a local supermarket, so it's possible I received an "own-brand" injection rather than something official, but the little card did say I was getting Pfizer-BioNTech - the Rolls Royce of vaccines, I like to think.
I was very brave, and did not cry as the pharmacist pumped me full of deranged genetic material. "Oh!" I said. "That's was - " "It's never as bad as you think," she cut me off. "Wait 15 minutes." Then she was gone.
I sat quietly, just like I was told, with a timer on my phone, to see if I had an allergic reaction. The pressure was distinct. Were these aches and pains new, or just because I was old? Did my elbow always click like that? Was I able to see in 3D before? Were the voices in my head always this insistent?
My existential dread was cut short by my timer beeping, so after smiling and waving to the disinterested pharmacist I walked home, wondering exactly how I was different, and when I will be rushing out to the pubs and clubs again, or return to licking door handles the way I used to. I have the second shot in April, so by the end of the month I will, more-or-less, be invincible. Hooray for science! But like a good citizen I won't be giving up the mask, the hand washing, the distancing (ugh - hugs!), the Holy Water, the methanol, or the hydroxychloroquinine just yet.
"You may feel a little prick." "That's nothing new."
