Which corona vaccine is right for me? (Satire)
Great news! A vaccine may become available before Christmas. If you do what’s right for your country and get a half-baked, half-tested jab in addition to avoiding your friends and family up until the 24th of December, you might be allowed to spend a few precious hours with your loved ones on Christmas Day. And as an added bonus for your good deeds, the Culture Ministry (or whoever is in charge) might even release the university students currently being held hostage in their dorms. It really is up to you and the choices you make to give them back their freedom and get them into a frame of mind where they might be willing to pay your pension one day. You certainly cannot rely on human rights lawyers to get them out before Christmas.
Of course, the decision to get vaccinated and the choice of vaccine requires careful consideration and should ultimately be made by yourself and your healthcare provider based on an in-depth review of your personal circumstances. To facilitate this discussion, I have prepared an amazing pseudoscience-based resource for you. Here goes. No medical procedure is ever without risks. So before deciding on a vaccine, you should ask yourself: “Do I really need a vaccine?” The following quiz has been designed to help you and your healthcare provider decide. Give yourself one point for every true statement, and zero points for every false statement; then check your results below.
The authoritative quiz to determine whether you need a corona vaccine
- In a typical week, I interact with several thousand people.
- In a typical week, I travel to at least a dozen countries.
- I am over 80 years old.
- I suffer from memory loss and cannot recall the list of established sexual partners approved by my Health Secretary.
- I am a pregnant obese diabetic asthmatic with a family history of heart disease.
- I get panic attacks just reading the fear-mongering newspaper headlines.
- I am on the brink of personal bankruptcy because I compulsively stockpile masks and hand sanitizer.
Your test result
6 points or less: I am not convinced that you need a vaccine, since your risk of dying from the virus appears to be quite low.
7 points: This is a tricky one. You will undoubtedly want to protect yourself against Covid, not to mention a few dozen other nasty viruses and pathogens that may well be floating around in the winter, but I’m not sure you can tolerate any jabs. Frankly, I am amazed you are still alive.
If you are still hell-bent on getting vaccinated, you face the daunting task of choosing from a couple hundred vaccines in development. Of course, we will be lucky (or unlucky, depending on your take) if any become commercially available before Christmas. You seethe regulators that need to approve them are actually trying to uphold their standards. It’s quite possible that the initially approved vaccines will be based on standard technology. If you have survived the flu jab in the past, you are likely to also survive corona vaccines based on the same technology, with the caveat that in a pandemic vaccine, you tend to get a bit less antigen (the stuff that looks like the virus) and more adjuvant (the “magnifying glass” that helps your immune system to see the trace amounts of antigen included in the vaccine, in a gentle or not-so-gentle manner).
If you are feeling a bit more adventurous, you could opt for an RNA-based vaccine. A lot of nonsense has been written about those, so let me clarify some misunderstandings. Yes, they contain genetic information. No, this genetic information won’t easily be integrated into your genome, because your cells can’t convert RNA to DNA (unless maybe if you have a HIV co-infection or something). Even if it were to get integrated into your DNA, it could only be used to make corona viruses. This would obviously mean that you would have to self-isolate for the rest of your life, but it certainly wouldn’t mutate you into a giant Ninja turtle (which is a pity, because for many years to come, turtles will have much more freedom than humans). As I said, the risk is infinitesimal. The real concern with injecting genetic information into you is that your immune system may not like it one bit. Personally, I’d prefer getting the whole virus to getting just some of its genetic information, but as I said, this is all about personal preferences.
If you don’t like the commercially available vaccines, you can always sign up for a clinical trial. Someone needs to be the guinea pig, and you might even get a little bit of money to compensate you for your … uh … time and effort. And if it goes horribly wrong, you can always sue the government (the vaccine makers have been indemnified, of course). Just one word of caution: I would not recommend any of the trials where they actually inject corona virus into you to speed up the vaccine development process (the problem with developing a pandemic vaccine is that hardly anyone ever gets corona, so it takes forever to figure out whether the vaccine worked, or whether the people who got the vaccine would have escaped the virus anyway). It sounds like a really bad idea to my ears. It’s one thing to expose yourself to a few assorted bugs when the guy next to you coughs in your direction and your mucosa are standing ready to decimate any intruder. It’s a whole other thing to have nasty bugs delivered directly into your bloodstream. If you really want to toy with death, do something fun, like bungee jumping or parachuting (these fun sports are unlikely to be affected by any lockdowns, because you are guaranteed to be socially distancing while playing them).
If you are really worried about the virus, but are struggling to warm up to any of the vaccine options, do not despair. There are plenty of Enhanced Social Distancing measures that can keep you safe. If you have kids at university, encourage them to stay in their dorms until they have paid back their student loans. Never forget to remind them how lucky they are and how tough life was when you were young, and they will gladly oblige, if only to escape your sermons. If you have underage children, give them up for adoption. (If you feel lonely, buy a dog. According to the latest kidology, pets don’t spread the virus). If all else fails, consider moving to London. Nowhere in the world is social distancing easier than in ghost town London, provided you avoid the rush hour. Rush hour is at 10pm, a direct consequence of the pub curfews. Fortunately, we no longer have a morning rush hour, since no one goes to work anymore. The only downside from moving to London is that the New Year’s Eve fireworks have been cancelled because pyrotechnic spreads the virus (or something like that). I know you will want to make your own, but please don’t go overboard in your living room. You will overwhelm our healthcare system. Thank you.
