Got my COVID vaccine!

On Monday 26th I took a minibus taxi up to the capital, St John’s, to get my first shot of the vaccine. They are doing anyone who wants it, regardless of whether you’re a foreigner. The vaccination centre was pretty quiet and very efficient – from walking in and registering to getting the jab took about 8 minutes. Quite outstanding!

Unfortunately there is resistance to being vaccinated amongst a significant part of the local population. This is the result of various conspiracy theories. Things were probably not helped by the prime minister saying he would be among the first to be vaccinated – and then it turned out that he got vaccinated 3 weeks before public vaccinations started, with the Moderna vaccine rather than the Astra Zeneca vaccine which everyone else is getting… So ironically it seems that the community with the highest vaccine take-up rate is the (foreign, rich and white) cruising community…

I was fortunate: I had no adverse effects from the vaccine at all. It seems that a lot of people get flu-like symptoms after their first dose. Over dinner and drinks last night, it was suggested to me that my lack of symptoms meant that I already had antibodies in my system, meaning that I’ve had COVID. This seems quite a reasonable suggestion to make – BUT I have just looked online, and found the results of a large study published on April 27th in The Lancet, the UK medical journal. This study, based on some 600,000 people who had been given the Pfizer and Astra Zeneca vaccines, suggests that side effects are MORE common in people who have had COVID, for both the vaccines. So it seems that the scientific evidence gives no reason to say that my lack of symptoms means that I’ve had Covid; if anything, it makes it moderately more likely that I’ve not had COVID! (The only thing that one can say with certainty is that a lot of what is said and written about COVID is not true… And the problem is made more difficult by conflicting scientific studies, based on different numbers of people, at different times, in different places. The one thing that does appear to be true is that the vaccines overall are having a strongly positive effect on the number of new cases, and especially hospitalisations and deaths – very evident in recent data out of the UK). 

The benefit of the vaccine to me is obvious: it should make travel between different countries easier! I have not been concerned with the risks of getting COVID – at 58, in apparently good health and being what most people would call pitifully skinny (!), I have all along considered my risk of serious illness to be low (and therefore wasn’t worried about sailing off into the blue alone). Add to that the feeling that I had COVID last March, before lockdown started – which would be no surprise, given that I was travelling on packed tubes into central London every day! For a couple of nights back then, I had a bit of a temperature and felt vaguely fluey, but in the mornings I felt ok and continued to go into work – it was only after lockdown started and we all became very aware of the possible symptoms, that I realised that I had likely had COVID (and, unfortunately, possibly been spreading it!). 

Won’t it be wonderful, come the day when no-one talks about COVID anymore!