The final jab?

The year 2020 has been gashed into our skin. It has become a part of our memory for all the wrong reasons — it felt like a decade of quarantines, isolations and lockdowns. It started as a thread of misfortune and ended as a cloth of misery. How has it taught us the importance of prevention? How did ‘prevention is better than cure’ turned into ‘prevention is the only cure’?

We are starting to lose count of the fallen and are desperately looking towards the heavens for vaccines to rain on us and cleanse us from the virus.

Those alive today have never lived through the need of a vaccine to the development of a vaccine and finally the actual process of getting vaccinated. Never before has a vaccine received this much attention and anticipation. The approval of the first Covid-19 vaccine as 2020 is about to end will finally fill many wounds this year has inflicted on us.

We are witnessing a remarkable peak in science and technology as within a year Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna among others are looking towards licensing their vaccines. The UK has become the first to approve a Covid vaccine and aims to start immunising its people this week. Finally, we edge closer to using the golden bullet we desired so greatly.

For our country, the worst is yet to come. Our initial, and even late, response to Covid-19 was divided. A large section took it as an attempt to once again dirty our hands in foreign aid. A more popular opinion, especially among the lower class, was that Pakistani doctors deliberately injected patients with a kind of poison and used an imaginary virus as a shield for their evil deeds. A question these people need to ask themselves is: how can public sector hospitals provide doctors with a mysterious and rare poison when they cannot even provide Paracetamol tablets? Nonetheless, this divided response might further meet division, rejection and conspiracies when the time of using a vaccine on our people would come. Will the Covid vaccine meet the same fate as the polio vaccine? Will biotechnology once again be thrashed in our country along with the vaccinators? Will we be the only country in the world where coronavirus, like polio, would never be eliminated?

The most helpless segment of our society is healthcare workers. Doctors, nurses and paramedics have seen the unseen and heard the unheard during the pandemic. They worked with no support from the public or those at the top. We are a country where we force our white coat messiahs to take to the streets for basic rights such as safety and security. If and when the vaccine arrives in our country, will healthcare workers — the highest of high-risk individuals — receive the first shot or will it fall prey to politics and unseen forces? Either way, there will be no surprise.

The world is racing towards securing the initial vaccine batches. Different countries have used different approaches to complete their vaccine journey. The UK is well on its way to start using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, the first country to do so. Russia and China licensed their own vaccines in July, well before final results came in. the US has Moderna in its backyard whose vaccine is 94% effective.

Powerful countries will once again take the lead and for them it might seem to be the beginning of the end. But for the rest it is the end of the beginning as unforeseen challenges and disparities are yet to be met. Canada, has contracts for 246 million vaccine doses, for its population of 38 million. Poor countries which have a large population in far-flung areas, and electricity shortages and heat waves — will have to solve logistic issues such as achieving ultra-cold temperatures needed to transport the vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech.

Pakistan’s fate, in all this, is not difficult to predict. When we acquire the vaccine, will it be the last jab in our ongoing war against the microscopic world or not? It is yet to be seen.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2020.

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