I got my booster dose of Covid-19 vaccination two days ago. Pfizer manufactured it, and that was after two previous doses of AstraZeneca, the last of which was in June 2021. My wife and I were the first to request for such a booster at the Community Health Center and because the packaging was for six doses per vial, there was no way only two doses would have been administered while four would be thrown away as unused after reconstitution. I got the message as clearly expressed by the matron that was to administer it. But I was not going to allow the obstinacy of others to stop me from what has become a personal responsibility to do what I consider was right. The matron showed a lot of understanding and strenuously apologized because I had called her repeatedly for the appointment same day before she asked us to come.
But she did not factor that it was about their closing time and the probability of any other person coming for the booster was unlikely. I quickly called three relations of mine that I knew had joined me in the earlier vaccinations and within an hour of waiting they showed up and the booster vaccine was administered on all of us. I did not think twice inadequately appreciating with cash the senior matron on behalf of the 3 or 4 others on duty who had to wait without any frown for 1-hour after the official closing time in a government health centre.
As they say good indeed begets good. I returned to my office and an uncommon favour came my way, when a client and enthusiastic dog owner came calling about an hour after his wife and son had come to pay off their bill and picked up two of their three Rottweiler dogs that were boarded in our hospital kennels for twenty-three days as they went abroad for holiday through the yuletide into the new year. He came for the most uncooperative of the dogs in a separate vehicle to avoid severe injuries from dog fighting as they used to do. We got talking about such human angle stories that form part of the daily varieties of our busy lives. After all, we are all humans first before becoming professionals. Work, work and work without play makes Jack a dull boy, was a rhyme we grew up with in those days. We talked so much about Covid-19, the vaccine booster that I had just taken and the hesitancy of others and how much its complications are still killing people, some of whom we both knew, and the lack of mass testing as a possible reason for the mass disbelief in the country. As he stood to leave, he stretched out a bulgy envelope containing what turned out to be a most surprising season’s cash gift, which according to him was in appreciation for the services he enjoyed from our facility over the years caring for their dogs. It was a reversed role and to which I was most grateful, because we had not even given him the usual promotional items to appreciate the client’s loyalty and patronage for the year.
Then I suddenly realized that I had also just blessed the workers at the health center, and when I counted the cash, it was exactly ten times the value of cash wads I gave about an hour earlier. Thank you, God. It was from our discussion that I learned that the former strong man in the United States of America had finally surrendered himself for a booster Covid-19 vaccination, despite the bold face against the existence of the pandemic in those days when he reigned as a demigod. Leaders often don’t realize that a significant population within and outside their immediate spheres look up to them as role models, and practically adopt decisions they take wholeheartedly. There are so many people who wield influences over others at different levels and whose activities and attitudes get copied as a rule and for which the leaders would not even know nor become vicariously liable for the consequences. This is the reason we all need to be mindful of what we say and what we do publicly. It is for such people that I have titled this article the way it is. When later on there are new reasons or wisdom eventually prevail in the minds of those leaders or preachers or advocates of falsehood and they choose the right and better option, they leave their loyalists behind in limbo and in perpetual errors. That is where wickedness comes in if they do not go back with equal prominence to announce their change of heart.
Majority of these influencers don’t look back at all, in the same manner they do with politics when they cross carpets from one party to another without caring how their supporters manage the fallouts. To a careful observer, the incoherence by the promoters of the conspiracy theories against Covid-19 vaccination and non-pharmaceutical measures seems to be losing steam in the social media, giving us the hope that lies indeed have expiry dates. Suddenly, all those horrible stories of injection sites lighting bulbs or becoming magnetic have been debunked and there have not been newer tales indoctrinating enough to replace them.
They have run out of their evil ideas and would have to wait endlessly for any other cogent reason to support their position of hesitancy against vaccination. Initially, their converts were made to believe that there were no sufficient clinical trials before the deployment of the Covid-19 vaccines, as if the health authorities no longer lead the science of weighing the strength over weakness in the use of any drug, vaccine or biologics as have forever been the case. That was quite disrespectful of those in whose hands we have always benefitted from adequate public health. The believers in those conspiracy theories are fueling the panacea for disorderliness. Some of their champions are in isolation wards sick of Covid-19, while many have returned to their makers to give account of how they sojourned on earth.
When low-level clinical trials was no longer the vogue, they switched and compared the methods that were used in manufacturing vaccines during the previous smallpox epidemics in the sixties as a better alternative over and above the modern science that is the backbone for today’s manufacturing of Covid vaccines, even in the face of the ongoing pandemic. To the proponents of such theories, they would not object to advancement in every other aspect of life and would rather drive in new model cars in preference to what we saw as relics in museums as old cars of the past, but they would wish that the same strategy of vaccine productions in the sixties which was certainly an improvement over what Edward Jenner taught the world as the founder of vaccinology in the west in 1796, must be upheld before Covid-19 vaccine would be considered good enough. Then when recently, the need for additional booster was announced, they went gaga dancing to what they thought was a failure of the original need for vaccination. No, it is not a failure in any way, rather it is the blessing which new knowledge confers.