As she delivers the jab she tap-taps around the needle site with her fingertips. Tricking the body so it doesn't over-react or something. My arm will be considerably less sore than my partner's, who didn't get the taps, so who knows?
Yes, I'm nervous. It's a new vaccine. Nothing is risk-free. But there is a certain sense of history. And it feels like a small act of defiance. Some of the great minds – well, minds – of my times have gone down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes. Take Naomi Wolf, former feminist icon for her 1990 bestseller, The Beauty Myth. I had a tetchy interview with her about her snappily titled 2012 book, Vagina: A New Biography, in which Wolf reclaims her rightful orgasmic pyrotechnics after a glitch in her sexual matrix, and writes, "To understand the vagina properly is to realise that it is not only coextensive with the female brain but is also part of the female soul." I may have been a little sceptical about some it. She may have hung up on me.
Now Twitter has hung up on her, suspending her account after claims she was spreading vaccine disinformation. Sample Wolf tweet reproduced in the Times: "Unvaccinated people continue to report feeling ill when in enclosed rooms for a length of time with vaccinated people." Before Covid she was on about chemtrails.
There's plenty to legitimately critique about responses to the pandemic. Why go the full, exhausting, dangerous Covid-truther route? It seems to be about a desperation to maintain unbridled individual freedom – a myth at the best of times – when the going gets tough. Reading the remorseless output of the anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-science brigade can feel like re-living that period in your teenager's development when they liked to headbang to Rage Against the Machine's lyric, "F*** you, I won't do what you tell me." Most people grow up or there would be no such thing as society.
Life before a lot of modern vaccines wasn't so flash. I got it all - chickenpox, mumps, scarlet fever. A little friend across the road got measles, developed encephalitis, and never fully recovered.
As I left the vaccination centre, I felt a little woozy. I felt lucky. But anyone who seriously thinks we are where we are in Aotearoa, precarious though it is, entirely by chance might consider why so many other countries, big, small, rich, poor, have had such inexplicably rotten luck. No one made any of the people at the vaccination centre that day turn up. They just looked at the world we're in, weighed the odds and decided to give it their best shot.
Next week: Steve Braunias
