NEEDLED

You could call me one of the lucky ones; one of the cho­sen few.

A week ago, I had my sec­ond dose of Mod­erna Covid-19 vac­cine at Bel­lvitge Hos­pi­tal in L’Hos­pi­talet de Llo­bre­gat just out­side Barcelona. This was the same med­ical cen­tre that suc­cess­fully op­er­ated on me to trans­plant a kid­ney 3 years ago, giv­ing the rea­son for why I stood in line on a Fri­day evening with mainly 70 year olds, some of whom un­doubt­edly have mal­func­tion­ing im­mune sys­tems, as I do.

I’m in this cat­e­gory be­cause since the cam­paign started in Cat­alo­nia on De­cem­ber 27 last year, at the time of writ­ing, 1,572,518 res­i­dents had been given the first dose of the var­i­ous vac­cines. That rep­re­sents just 20.36% of the total pop­u­la­tion. Of these, just over half a mil­lion peo­ple have also been ad­min­is­tered the sec­ond dose (6.49% of the pop­u­lace). Nat­u­rally, I don’t want to sound un­grate­ful. I don’t want to sound at all petty. I’m one of the biggest sup­port­ers of pub­lic health sys­tems any­where on this planet of mar­vels and mys­ter­ies. It just strikes me as dis­ap­point­ing that or­gan­i­sa­tion from the EU, Spain and our gov­ern­ment here wasn’t bet­ter. It dis­turbs me. You could say, in an­other mean­ing of the word, it nee­dles me. There are even large num­bers of school teach­ers (for ex­am­ple, my wife who’s in her mid-50s) who have not yet had their Covid pro­tec­tion max­imised with a sim­ple in­jec­tion.

I ac­cept that some causes for de­lays have been out­side the con­trol of local au­thor­i­ties. One case in point was the clo­sure of the Eu­ro­tun­nel under the Eng­lish Chan­nel just be­fore Christ­mas. Re­port­edly, the main rea­son for the slow speed of the vac­cine roll­out in Cat­alo­nia was that fridges (which are used to store doses) were trapped in Dover, one of Eng­land’s main ports.

Of course, that was 4 months ago now. And yes, I know there are plans to quicken the pace so that 70% of the pop­u­la­tion will have been cov­ered by the end of Au­gust. Plans don’t im­press me. Well-co­or­di­nated ac­tion does.

There are other parts of the world that have done this task much more ef­fi­ciently. Un­sur­pris­ingly maybe, places like Aus­tralia and New Zealand who’ve had rel­a­tively few cases of Covid have also al­ready begun vac­ci­na­tion pro­grams. Even that ob­scenely cor­rupt, mal­func­tion­ing cor­po­ra­tion called the United King­dom is look­ing pretty flash on this ques­tion.

While I’m all riled up, I’ll men­tion an­other re­lated point. Now that it seems agreed that there’s going to be some kind of spe­cial travel “pass­port” for the pre-vac­ci­nated elite like me in Eu­rope, I have to ask about what’s going to hap­pen to every­one else in the next few months lead­ing into and through the sum­mer?

What about the op­por­tu­nity to travel across bor­ders (is it even a human right?) Chil­dren, young peo­ple, many im­mi­grant adults and all those not lucky enough to be im­mu­nised are clearly going to be dis­crim­i­nated against.

And here’s an­other cru­cial error. I was ar­gu­ing from the very start of sci­en­tific in­ves­ti­ga­tion into a vac­cine that it should be cen­trally run by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion and an en­hanced Eu­ro­pean Med­i­cines Agency. The pan­demic was, and still is, much too dan­ger­ous and long-last­ing to be han­dled by local gov­ern­ments as pris­on­ers of pri­vate in­ter­ests who make med­i­cine for profit.

Surely, one sin­gle con­tract should have been given to the most ef­fec­tive vac­cine com­pany and the patent for that vac­cine should have been waved in the in­ter­ests of global pub­lic health.

But I sup­pose that wouldn’t have been a fi­nan­cial shot in the arm for the pharma gi­ants, would it?