Negotiating the perils of a Covid vaccination

Well, that’s it. The deed is done. I’ve been shot.

Perhaps I should rephrase that. The words I used may be a little misleading. 

I’ve had my first shot of anti-Covid vaccine.

This means I’ve exposed myself to the ominous threat of suffering a blood clot. I believe the risk may be as high as 4 per million, so you can imagine how worried I am. Maybe some of that looming peril is compensated for by eliminating the risk of getting a blood clot from catching Covid, which I think is running at around 15,000 per million for unvaccinated people here in Spain. It strikes me that 15,000 is a bigger number than 4, but I expect a conspiracy theorist with a good grasp of the arithmetic could explain to me why that isn’t so.

I must admit that it was a bit of a relief to have the shot, since I’d been waiting a while. I explained before that Danielle and I are in a bit of an unfortunate age group in this country: we’re too young to fall into one priority group, but too old to fall into the other. It seemed as though we were going to be left dangling between two stools for quite a while. 

You can imagine how encouraging it is to be out of that uncomfortable and embarrassing position.

The process itself was remarkably rapid and efficient. 

It all went quickly in the end. A text message turned up on Monday, inviting me to have the shot itself on Wednesday. The instruction was to present myself at ‘C. DEPORT. MUNIC. PATERNA, POLIGONO INDUSTRIAL NORTE, s/n, PATERNA’ without any of those boring things such as postcodes let alone a map reference.

What was the ‘C'. for exactly? Clearly not ‘Calle’, Street, so was it ‘Centro’? It turned out that it was ‘Ciudad’, ‘City’. So, along with ‘DEPORT.’ for ‘deportiva’, it meant ‘Sports City’.

With little certainty that my GPS would get me to the right place, I turned up dead early, in case I had to go somewhere else. Imagine my relief when I found the desks set up and ready to receive arrivals for vaccinations. As so often in Spain, I should simply have shown a little more faith.

A relief: the reception desk for vaccination. I was at the right place

The place was a ‘vacunódromo’ (a ‘vaccine-o-drome’). Our local one, in the town of Paterna, was, as you've doubtless guessed, in a sports centre. Spain has set up a chain of these across the country, to deliver the treatment as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. That’s the nation’s response to a painful delay caused by the failure of the EU, and the manufacturers, to provide doses in the quantities expected earlier in the year. 

That delay is used, curiously enough, by that strange breed of Englishmen, the Boris Johnson supporter, to crow about the superiority of their country, and above all of their corkscrew of a man Boris Johnson, over things Spanish. I keep trying to point out to them that Spain’s catching up: Spain carried out twice as many vaccinations in April than the UK, suggesting that the British lead is rapidly disappearing, and Johnson’s one claim to success is reducing just as rapidly.

We were processed at heartwarming speed. One desk checked our identities. Another asked us about allergies and possible medical conditions. The final one recorded our arrival and sent us through to little plastic sheeted booths where the doses were administered.

I particularly enjoyed the desk where we were asked the medical questions. 

“How old are you?” one of the staff asked

“Sixty-eight,” I told her.

After checking on any allergies I might have, drugs I might be taking and diseases I might be suffering from, they were ready to move me on. But I’d read the information sheet we’d been given and knew there was one question they hadn’t asked me.

“I’m not pregnant either.” 

I wanted that on the record. I particularly enjoyed making the point because, as an adjective, in Spanish the word for pregnant agrees with the noun. So I was using it with a masculine ending.

“Ah,” said the nurse, without missing a beat, “not that either, then?”

“No. At my age, it’s not really possible,” I explained. Helpfully, I hope.

I’d arrived twenty-five minutes early. But they saw me at once. The result was that it was still ten minutes before my appointment time when they sent me through into a kind of recovery area, where we were asked to sit for quarter of an hour to ensure we had no serious reaction to the vaccine.

Into the area of the vaccine-o-drome set aside for recovery
from the stress of vaccination
Note the time on the clock: still nine minutes ahead of my appointment

I didn’t, so fifteen minutes later I was on my way. I had a dose of the Pfizer vaccine in my arm. I’d taken a big step forward towards protecting myself and the people around me from a most unpleasant and harmful disease.

Now we just need Danielle to be called too.

There’s one thing, though, that may still be a cause for anxiety. Have I, by accepting this vaccination, made myself simply clay in the hands of some diabolical figures leading a massive international plot against mankind? In support of the anti-vaxxer claims, I must admit that I emerged from having the shot, thinking that both George Soros and Bill Gates had done some admirable things during their long careers.

Gates and Soros: am I just clay in their hands now?

Still. I felt the same way on the way in. So perhaps that doesn’t make the conspiracy theorists’ case all that well for them, after all.