The best vaccine is the one you have access to

I was on duty at the mass vaccination centre where I volunteer, in Dublin, filtering my queue of pensioners up to  the vaccination bays, when someone said in a South African accent: “It’s virry naas to hear a Sarth Efrican iccent!”

I didn’t get a chance to chat with this cheerful couple any further because my queue was a glacier, slow but  unstoppable, yet I felt a twinge in my heart as they disappeared up the escalator to Vaccination Land. Lucky people.

When might everyday South Africans get immunised back home? I think of my mum, my special-needs sister, the coming winter, the inevitable closed-in spaces, the feared South African variant, and I want to scream.

I could weep that they sent away the AstraZeneca vaccines – everybody’s least favourite jab, it seems, after the Chinese one and the Russian one – because they aren’t particularly effective at preventing the SA variant.

If only we’d used them anyway, because the most effective vaccine is the one going into your arm.

True, some may be less successful at slowing transmission of newer variants, but crucially ALL of the coronavirus vaccines significantly reduce the severity of all infections – including the mutations – and, with that,  hospitalisation and death.

Yes, some are “better,” but the difference is minor when compared to the difference between getting one or none at all.

Chile, for instance, is battling a third wave, but is now jabbing its vulnerable with the Chinese shot, and already they’re seeing a drop in serious illness.

That, surely, is what matters: dialling down the danger of coronavirus to that of the common cold. We need  vaccines, any vaccines, the quicker the better.

However, the richest nations have already secured around six billion doses, while the rest – four-fifths of the planet’s population – have scrabbled desperately to get just 2.6 billion.

Meanwhile, vaccine diplomacy spreads, with China and Russia sensing an opportunity to grow their influence in the “third world” through apparent benevolence, while the democratic west panics to inoculate its citizens – its voters – first.

Perhaps they forget we’re an interconnected world though, that mutations will flourish wherever vaccination  doesn’t…

So right now the best vaccine is whichever one we can get.