by Alex Sanchez-Vivar

‘I began to feel nauseous. I had a raging temperature and I was very weak. I could only get out of bed to crawl to the bathroom. I booked myself a test at the local centre; the results of which came back positive. I had Covid-19’.

This could have been a conversation any of us might have heard in the last year.

Government reports and news coverage of the spread of the coronavirus have introduced us to a new world of words and acronyms, epidemic curves and figures. Hidden in that new vocabulary and in those line graphs and numbers, we could only guess – and pray for – the pain and heartbreak, often not registered, behind each individual hospital admission or death. Sadly, it seems though that we have only learned to be less numb to the death toll – or indeed to other consequences of the pandemic if it was scaled down to a more personal level.

Parallel to the ongoing efforts to flatten the infection curve since we first heard of the pandemic, global hope took the shape of the largest and perhaps most complex vaccination programme ever in history. While most of us have appeared willing to get vaccinated against Covid-19, vaccine compliance has remained variable and inconsistent between countries, regions and among certain age or race groups. Vaccine resistance (or more strongly, refusal) is not new: it has challenged immunisation strategies since the smallpox vaccination was introduced in the 19th century. It was no different for Covid-19 vaccines, even if we acknowledge that since they became available, they have contributed significantly – albeit with a long list of unknowns – to the recent ‘normalisation’ of social life.