Will vaccination ever end? Of booster vaccine 4... and 5

Will vaccination ever end?  Of booster vaccine 4... and 5

It was almost 12.25pm when I saw the missed call from Edu.  I had kept the phone in the pocket of my coat that was hanging on my seat and did not hear it vibralert me of his incoming call.  I immediately knew what it was all about.  It was another ‘runday Wednesday’ and I was being called to action.

However, this was not to be.  I was just ‘recovering’ from the very painless corona vaccination on the left arm this time round, after that right arm fiasco of January.  I had enquired before sitting on that chair, facing the small refrigerated container.  This had been placed on a table just in front of the seating position in the small makeshift booth.  This booth had been curved out of a large normally open meeting room, to create some privacy.

“My last vaccination was on January twenty-six,” I started, querying the nurse when the traffic had gone down after a three-hour event, “Am I really due for a booster?”

“Yes, it is already twenty-four weeks since that time,” the nurse responded confidently.

It was not for nothing that I was making the query.  I had been participating in the data entry process since morning, where we update the details of those vaccinated.  I had encountered two cases that called to question this 6-month duration, as far as the registration system was concerned.  One staff had added 6-months to the January 24 date and just told me on my face that he would be waiting for his booster shot after July 24.  Another January-case staff had stubbornly got the booster shot and was stopped on his track when the system refused to register the vaccination, giving a ‘not yet due date’ error.

So, finally, I sat there just before the 12.30pm break and endured the most painless injection this year.  Even the January one had some cold feeling on the arm, but this one, nada.  I wondered why some adults had to be held down to receive this baby needle on the arm.  There were even two loud shouts of pain within the day.  

Anyway, people are different and there is no right (or wrong) way to react to a piece of one-inch-long stainless-steel needle when it burrows itself below the skin.  The update of the system, in my case, did not give any error and soon I could see a second entry on the vaccination certificate, indicating a ‘booster’ of Pfizer.  The certificate that started with a single entry of AstraZeneca just last year, had now grown into 4 entries.

At this rate, we shall soon be walking around with a booklet that shall be keeping track of the many vaccination shots that we are likely to be having due to this corona thing.  The very corona which forced me to fail to do my customary Wednesday run, despite the day having the first sunny weather in a week.  It has been as cold as ice.  The very same corona that causes that dreaded COVID19 disease which had continued to plague the globe with 563,311,932 cases and 6,377,278 deaths, with Kenyan numbers being 336,053 and 5,668 respectively*.  All these in just 2-years.

*source: worldometers website

Of course, we did not have very kind words for corona during the lunch break, with the team of fellow members of the logistics team that had helped out in the camp.  For the umpteenth time I was reminded that corona was a hoax.

“Which disease spares young ones and only attacks the adults?”

WWB, the Coach, Nairobi, Kenya, July 13, 2022