Casual vaccine chat is today’s only form of small talk, so it’s not surprising it would take a lightheartedly tribal turn. Ultimately, of course, gratitude is at the heart of the conversation
Last week, I had cause to go searching for images of men getting vaccinated (it’s not a fetish – it was for work) and I turned up a photo from a flu vaccination drive in 2012. I tried to think back nine years: did we have anti-flu-vaxxers? Were there different types of vaccine and did we care which one we got? These are rhetorical, by which I mean stupid, questions. Even when I think I don’t remember, I remember perfectly well. We never thought about the flu vaccine, because we didn’t really feel anything about flu.
There’s something endearing about the intensity of opinions about Covid vaccinations, as though we’re all trying to wrestle every untamed feeling about the giant, untoward event of the pandemic into more manageable shapes and sizes: tribes and allegiances, preferences and views. It’s like being a teenager again – the emotions are just too vast to comprehend, too volatile to make sense of. But maybe if I scratch “AstraZeneca” on to my desk, someone else might like AstraZeneca, too, and then at least there would be two of us.
