Did you get your vaccine? You did? Which one? Oops, you chose wrong!
Country singer Bruce Springsteen, who will be performing in a city where nobody listens to Bruce Springsteen, is barring anyone who got the AstraZeneca vaccine from attending the Broadway performance. While news of this ban comes as no consequence to New Yorkers, it may leave some confused as to the way one vaccine is wrong, and the others are not.
Alongside obligatory exclusion of the untouchables caste of unvaccinated people, those who opted for the AstraZeneca jab have, unfortunately for them, take a product that is not FDA approved. Why support and encouragement for this vaccine are then so high despite this fact is another matter entirely. Either way, you aren’t getting in. This as well maybe the start of a trend.
What is perhaps even more worrying for the AstraZeneca crowd is the fact that a vaccine isn’t exactly something you can take back. Once your body’s taken it in, it’s not taking it out. Some have questioned if they could possibly get another shot, one that is on this newly vamped “okay list”. Something that is, probably, not unlike over-medicating and perhaps very dangerous. You wouldn’t suddenly start taking another medication while another is still in your system and you don’t know how the two would interact.
This dilemma, in essence, has dropped the AstraZeneca recipients in the same social wrung as those without vaccination: Lower than, in theory, those who caught covid and recovered – that is to say the overwhelming majority of them. With more authoritarian states devising travel requirements and restrictions, AstraZeneca recipients now find themselves in the position of being “unsafe” and being unable to do anything about it; much like those unable to get vaccinated due to health-related exemptions.
Though, if it’s any consolation, it’s all too likely that requirements will change yet again. Consensus on whether vaccines are effective against burgeoning new strains – which will continue to emerge forever as coronaviruses do – is, unsurprisingly, inconclusive. Will this lead to yet another wave of damming lock-downs, vaccines, or no vaccines? Time will tell.
