I recently had Covid, which means that I now possess a sort of temporary super-immunity. I could invite you all to cough in my mouth, I could lick every surface and door-handle in your house, and I probably will, because I’m dirty like that.
Having Covid is like someone standing on the spongy surface of your brain and ripping into it with a pneumatic drill, the force of it sending tremors down your limbs and through your hips like some malevolent Mexican Wave. Somewhere down below, a man with unfeasibly large palms plays your balls like bongo drums. One minute you’re cold, like an ex-girlfriend; the next minute you’re boiling hot, like you’re trapped in your 78-year-old grandmother’s living room on a balmy summer’s day while she’s got the heating on full bung cause she’s ‘bloody freezing’.
The shakes were intolerable. On the second or third day I went for a piss in the dead of night and genuinely couldn’t stop my body from shivering and spasming. I felt like some sort of James Brown tribute act. Or the Ghostbusters when they crossed the streams. I certainly gave my young sons a run for their money in the ‘pish all over the floor’ stakes. But then I often do.
My sister, my youngest son, my girlfriend and her kids all had Covid at the same time. The worst aspect of this virus is the worry it places on you for the people around you. I can take it – you think to yourself, as hope and scepticism battle inside you – but what about them? After all, this isn’t the flu (although that can kill you too – fat grandpa, I’m looking at you). Headlines like ‘PERFECTLY HEALTHY DOUBLE-VACCINATED MARATHON RUNNER DIES OF COVID’ don’t help. Especially since the marathon runner was hit by a train the day he tested positive, but that information’s buried in the last paragraph of the newspaper report, and who the hell reads past the headline these days? Unless it’s an article about two celebrities shagging each other, of course.
The second worst aspect is the isolation: feeling like a leper; desperately missing all of the mundane rituals you’ve always fervently hated. So you actively plan a two-week comeback safari around every supermarket within a fifty-mile radius starting the very second your quarantine ends. There soon will be photo albums filled with snaps of you shaking hands with the Tesco security guard and laughing fondly with the old checkout lady at Morrisons.
Covid fucks with you. It’s a trickster God. A few days into my viral experience I felt an inexplicably powerful surge of energy and enthusiasm. I woke up feeling not just better, but superhuman. Cheery, vibrant, ready to seize the day. Was it my one little dose of vaccine starting to turn the tables on the Cov and kick its bat-munching ass? Was my immune system doing a victory lap? Had someone slipped crack into the water-supply? Whatever the reason, I was on fire. I set about re-organising furniture like a Tetris champion; ridding cupboards of junk in the same manner a lion would rid an antelope of its intestines, and taking to housework with the zeal of Magda from ‘There’s Something About Mary’ after a gub-load of speed. The next day, however, I woke up feeling like a dragon had shat in my brain, then flambed it. The headache was back. The virus kicked in the saloon doors of my internal organs and went on a rampage, visiting first the stomach and bowel, then moving upwards to fuck with my lungs. I felt exhausted. Depressed. Wretched.
I still had to look after my youngest son, thankfully with some help from my similarly afflicted sister (great name for a death metal band, that). Christopher was infected but mercifully asymptomatic. This meant that he had bags of little boy energy and I felt like an old man breathing his last on his death bed, which admittedly isn’t that different from the norm. Luckily, I was co-parenting with the nearest thing I could get to Dr Spock: the television. God bless you Peppa Pig and Ryan’s Toy Review. I promise I won’t mutter so much about killing you in your sleep once this is all over.
Once our isolation ended my son and I journeyed to Aldi. I’ve never been so pleased to stand at a check-out while shopping was being launched at me with the speed of a champion tennis serve. On the return journey my little boy said to me, ‘You’re the best daddy ever.’ That’s beautiful, I thought. He realises how hard it was for me to nurture and entertain him in my weakened state. He appreciates me. By god he appreciates me.
‘What makes you say that buddy?’
‘Because you just let me watch TV all the time.’
Great. Just add ‘always cooks me chicken nuggets’ and ‘never makes me wear ironed clothes’ and we’ve got the Divorced Dad Hat Trick.
I was due my second vaccine jab the same week I got Covid. Great timing. I got my first jab earlier in the summer at a walk-in Vaccination centre in my home town. Over-40s are – or at least were – automatically ear-marked for Astro Zeneca. For some reason I was very worried about the well-documented risks of strokes and blood-clots associated with Astro Zeneca, despite spending very little time worrying about the reality of being a middle-aged Scottish man who smokes, eats junk food and takes zero exercise (at least if any of those things cause my head to explode I’ll have earned it). It does boggle my brain, though, that we’ve taken care to shield the aging and the elderly from the worst effects of Covid, but think nothing of subjecting that same age group to a dose of something that might cause their cerebrum to burst like a soggy grape.
I’m not anti-Vax. I’m simply anti-positive-interpretations-of-my-own-luck. If something harbours the ability to give me a fatal blood clot, I’ll get a fatal blood clot. If I walked into a money-filled room wearing a jacket made of sticky-back plastic I’d snag a cool few million, but later die from paper cuts. Lady Luck, it seems, is just not that into me. So I told the people at the centre that it was Pfizer or nothing. They acquiesced to my request, though the man dispensing the vaccine told me I’d bought into propaganda. He did have a sense of humour, though, as evidenced by our little pre-needle exchange:
‘Have you any preference for which arm you get the jab in?’ he asked.
‘Surprise me,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair, with a mad glint in his eye, ‘I’m gonna give you Astro Zeneca!’
You don’t have to know the relative merits, risks and drawbacks of the two vaccines in order to make an informed choice. Just switch off the investigative part of your brain and listen to how the two names sound. Take Astro Zeneca. It’s terrifying. It sounds like a 300ft tall killer robot from outer space. “I AM ASTRO ZENECA. I WILL BATHE THE EARTH IN BLOOD AND SET FIRE TO IT USING THE BURNING HEART OF THE SUN. AND I WILL DO IT JUST FOR A LAUGH.” Pfizer, on the other hand, sounds like a goofy cartoon rabbit. The sort of heavy-lidded nincompoop who’s shite at everything, but adorably shite, so he gets away with it. He just spends his days laughing at his own farts, and wondering what clouds taste like, as the animals around him scrunch their faces and coo, ‘Ohhhh, Pfizer!’
But, obviously, my aversion to Astro Zeneca wasn’t solely shaped by a terror of ungodly space robots. In reality, not every reservation about Astro Zeneca can be filed under ‘c’ for ‘crackpot conspiracy theory’. At one point, most of Europe had banned it, and you can’t chalk all of that down to some Eurovision Song Contest-esque political point-scoring in the wake of Brexit. Plus, plenty of medical data (find your own fucking sources) suggests that Astro Zeneca, more than any of the other available vaccines – and I’m going to be using some very esoteric scientific language here, so do try to focus – fucks shit up.
To a point, you can’t blame people for being sceptical. Conspiracies have always existed, throughout all of human history. At a minimum, all you need is three human beings, and time. Here in our dog-eat-dog modern times, capitalism’s long and lasting legacy of greed and inhumanity – its veneration of luxury and profit and excess – encourages, nay sanctions, the use of conspiracies and corruption and psychopathy as handy tools to drive share-prices up. The only limit to success is a corporation’s imagination: it certainly isn’t ethics.
In the 1970s, Ford incurred a record-breaking fine when it was discovered that executives had known about and declined to fix a potentially fatal design flaw in Ford’s Pinto model. Ford’s own tests had shown that owing to the position of the fuel tank, a rear-end collision would be pretty likely to result in fire and death. However, Ford’s own cost-benefit analysis determined that it would be cheaper to run the gauntlet with law-suits than to take preventative – and life-saving – action, so they kept quiet. People died. Quelle surprise.
Medicine isn’t without its share of hubris, greed, miscalculations and scandals. We need only look at the opioid crisis in modern-day America, or the recent hefty fines slapped on GlaxoSmithCline and even on Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant I appear to trust, for some insane reason. And let’s not forget the horrifying scandal of the late 1950s and early 1960s when thalidomide, marketed as a safe treatment for morning sickness, was ultimately responsible for thousands of lost pregnancies, birth defects and deaths.
So it’s not inherently crazy to think, ‘I wonder if the profit-driven producers of this piece of medicine really have my best interests at heart?’ That being said, some objections to Covid vaccinations in general have flirted with full-blown insanity, particularly those pointing to the satanic nature of Bill Gates.
It’s hardly a new idea to point out the cognitive dissonance inherent in someone of the tinfoil-hat-variety decrying the vaccines for containing tiny, liberty-thieving micro-trackers, logging your every movement, whilst that person is doing all their decrying on a mobile phone, a device that actually does log your every movement. Bill Gates doesn’t know that you went to your grandmother’s last night and then went home to whack off over dwarf porn, but Google and Microsoft sure as shit do. Some conspiracy-minded folks among us even suggested that nanobots inside the vaccine would allow Bill Gates directly to control the vaccinated, perhaps through use of a joystick or PlayStation controller. Perhaps in concert with Elon Musk, the two of them playing real-life Grand Theft Auto using wee Jeanie and Ethel from Motherwell as avatars.
“Christ, Bill, Ethel must have gout or something. She’s not getting away from the cops fast enough! Jesus, I didn’t notice she was on fire.”
“Ha ha, Elon, I’ve just made my old Scottish woman do a loop-the-loop in her wheelchair INSIDE Home Bargains, so fuck you.”
“Damn it! Ethel’s burnt to death. YOU’RE USELESS, ETHEL! Hang on, taking over another avatar…. Senga…. age 76, from East Kilbride. Let’s see how much vroom this old bitch has in her tank.”
Anyway, I’m going to get my second jab as soon as I can.
Don’t tell Bill Gates. And if the vaccine kills me, feel free to come back to this blog-post and piss yourself laughing. Be well.