Vaxx to the max – or not

‘I’m not taking the vaccine,” my friend tells me matter-of-factly. I nearly choke on my coffee – how I miss my red, but desperate times and all.

We both lost a friend to Covid-19 two weeks ago and still shake our heads over the kids’ 25-year-old friend who was here one day, gone the next.

I’m shocked, to put it mildly. You see, this redhead does not wear a tinfoil hat and is by far the loudest shouting down flat-earthers.

She knows the polio vaccine saved thousands of kids from walking with a limp. But here she sits, cross-legged on my stoep,
calmly telling me “no jab”.

Why? She doesn’t feel “enlightened”, she tells me – a clever word she uses in many conversations.

She’s clever too; no conspiracy theorist; level-headed; all her kids are vaccinated, admittedly because the school system left her
with no choice.

I remember looking after those white fold-over vaccination cards better than my kids, because no jab, no Grade 1.

Her kids are pro-vaxxers “but it’s because they want to protect me, being Of That Age, you know?” she says over our third cuppa.

I’m quoting a Romanian orthodox priest who was called “Satan’s priest”, a “disbeliever” for having the vaccine because “I don’t want to send others to intensive care or to the Lord too soon through ignorance or stupidity”.

She stands fast…But I’m slowly enlightened: she knows too little about our Indian vaccine. And do you blame her?

Mention Pfizer and BioNTech and we all know it works. Study after study; trial after trial… It even works on SA’s mutation.

But ours… What’s it called again? And it’s not really Indian, is it? Just packaged there?

I blame Them. Forget your education programme for the herd. The herd needs facts – all of it.

How many trials? How many reports? How effective is it really? The only 62% I read this week?

And the big question: when? No wonder we are grasping at straws. We are not enlightened.

We hear about an animal dewormer that “works wonders” for Covid-19 – and we seriously think of using it, proven or not.

Good heavens, listen to the priest: “I trust the scientific authorities, not shamans, witchdoctors and whatnot.”

I’m getting my jab.

Carine Hartman.

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