The Vaccine Snobs

Cordelia is due to have her first Covid jab tomorrow and she has just learned that she will be given the Oxford AstraZenica. She is full of indignation at the prospect of receiving this common or garden vaccine instead of the far more exclusive Pfizer BioNTech which is famously high-maintenance, costs four times as much, and has a name made up of trendily idiosyncratic capitalisations. How will she ever live it down? It’s just like the time she was spotted sneaking into Lidl by Vanessa Muchmunnie.

All her friends who have been vaccinated have had the Pfizer and all boast about how they had no adverse reactions at all, whereas everyone who gets the Oxford AstraZenica is bedridden for days – you might as well have Covid. Her friend Aquaria is spurning vaccines altogether in favour of healing crystals and colloidal silver. This is clearly even more exclusive and Cordelia longs to do the same but she longs even more to go to Tuscany in the summer with the Carter-Owens and she might be required to have a vaccine passport. She is most annoyed that she cannot be vaccinated on BUPA: why on earth does one pay through the nose for private insurance if not to demand healthcare à la carte? She Googles risk factors for blood clots and rings her surgery to say she has all of them and therefore cannot possibly be given the AZ, but the receptionist tells her in a singularly impertinent tone that she’s not young enough to be offered an alternative. She considers changing GP, but that would mean going back to the surgery she left in a huff two years ago when they refused her an MRI scan for her tennis elbow.

Cordelia receives no sympathy from her husband Hugo, who bombards her with statistics on antibodies, immunity percentages and transmission rates in order to demonstrate that the Oxford AstraZenica is just as effective as the Pfizer. But Cordelia knows that all Hugo’s facts and figures conceal a very unscientific bias: he is a chest-thumping alumnus of Teddy Hall. She is duty-bound to sneer at the AZ because all her family went to Cambridge; the house now simmers with tensions that usually only surface on Boat Race day. Hugo has been very tetchy anyway because of government’s vaccine priority policy: while he agrees that old people needed to be done first because most of them vote Tory and must be kept alive until the next election, he feels very strongly that Brexiteers like him should be done next to reward them for their loyalty to Boris. Hugo has it on good authority that the PM thought so too but was over-ruled by Chris Whitty. Cordelia is embarrassed by the proximity of Hugo’s Brexitism to that of the flag-brandishing gammons who are refusing the Pfizer jab because it is not British. The blameless AZ is thus further tainted by Little England associations.

Cordelia finally accepts the inevitable and comforts herself by reading online conspiracy theories about the dangers of mRNA vaccines. ‘At least my DNA won’t be infiltrated by Bill Gates,’ she tells Marie-Claire on the phone, without having a clue what she’s talking about. ‘Give me a viral vector any day. And at least I’m having mine done at Epsom Racecourse – poor Melinda had to go to Debenhams for hers.’ Marie-Claire makes soothing noises and then plays her trump card on Facebook where she posts that she’s just had her Pfizer jab in Salisbury Cathedral to the organ accompaniment of Bach and Handel. Cordelia is beyond furious. Her only consolation is that she doesn’t live in Wales, where she would have been forced to have the Moderna which sounds like a hideous car made by someone ghastly like Vauxhall. In the end she decides simply to lie and say she had the Pfizer jab. It then occurs to her that this is exactly what all her friends have been doing.

© C P Jenkinson 18/05/2021

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