Kathy Sheridan: Complaints over vaccine queues a sad reflection on entitled, negative public

Last Friday, I showed up for my booster appointment at Citywest at 1pm sharp, armed with a big, padded coat, newspaper and some quality wine gums. Memories of a three-hour queue for my first AstraZeneca vaccination on a chilly April day still lingered, not of the wait but of the sullenness of the crowd. By contrast with the euphoric seventysomething Pfizer graduates spilling out of GP surgeries, that late-sixtysomething bunch had shades of an old Russian bread line.

Yet even the much-resented AstraZeneca being dumped on the sixtysomethings promised to be a game-changer. This free little jab was about to restore truly meaningful elements of our remaining years. We should have been dancing conga lines around Citywest.

A woman who seemed insuperably hostile turned out to be a case of severe vaccine hesitancy being bravely tackled. She was the only one who mentioned gratitude

So why the tetchy silence?

I inquired. One responded by tapping irritably on his watch. Another said the Government was "discriminating" by "forcing" AstraZeneca on her. A prickly pair said they wouldn't have bothered if they hadn't wanted a vaccine record for the holidays – and as for this "preposterous queue", well, "only in Ireland".

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A woman who seemed insuperably hostile turned out to be a case of severe vaccine hesitancy being bravely tackled. She was the only one who mentioned gratitude.

We had just come out of a disastrously incontinent Christmas but ordinary Joes like us were not to be blamed of course because we had somehow lost all personal agency. Media interviewers were demanding certainty about vaccination schedules that wholly depended on volatile production and vaccines yet to be approved. The carping, gotcha-style interrogations triggered another kind of contagion – a sense of entitlement, negativity and free potshots from all sides at public health doctors.

But we had choices. Months before Christmas 2020, Orla Hegarty, an architect and UCD academic, had written a piece here arguing that good ventilation in buildings was key to combating the Covid-19 aerosols stationed over us.

An authoritative New York Times reporter was advocating for the windows to be knocked out of US public transport. Better to be cold than to be sick.

Yes, the Government should have been at least as evangelical about air purity as it was about handwashing. Yes, Hepa filters should be everywhere but in the meantime we were – and still are – in a pandemic. Healthy throughputs of air, masks, cough hygiene and distancing were all the pandemic standards leading up to Christmas 2020. They still are. And now we lucky souls are doubly or trebly vaccinated. Is it really all that confusing or demanding?

Perspective: the booster is a triumph. Case numbers are falling in those lucky groups. Fewer people will take up an ICU bed or die. Yet one rheumatologist's timeline on Saturday was full of people giving out about the queues

“Play date or panto: now parents to be tasked with slowing Covid”, read a headline on Tuesday as if this “task” was yet another huge ask. Why shouldn’t parents take responsibility for deciding between a panto and a playdate as a new variant shows up and time is required to assess its impact on whole populations?

When plans were first floated for nine year olds and upwards to wear masks (indoors only, with exemptions obviously and for just a few weeks), reasons against this were trotted out, mainly based on “letting kids be kids”. Hegarty responded with shots of mask-wearing children around the globe dating from the 1918 Spanish flu in California, to Sars in Singapore in 1983, to Covid-19 era children in France, Germany, Africa and Brazil in 2020 and 2021. Mask-wearing in pandemics should look like the norm.

Children ape their elders, for good or ill.

On Monday, as free antigen testing finally became available for close schoolchild contacts (yes, very belatedly), the Minister for Health was tackled about the subsidised antigen tests mooted for everyone else. Having bought a handful at €2.90 apiece in Dunnes Stores last Friday after paying €7.50 for one a week before, it seemed obvious to me that the market had indeed been shamed into an affordable price correction as Stephen Donnelly was suggesting. It was clear the estimated €40 million a week cost could be better spent – some of it ideally on bald public information that nose-swabbing actually hurts if you're doing it right. Yet the airwaves crackled with the mystery of the vanishing antigen subsidy.

But every adult comes armed with instincts, basic knowledge and the now-familiar choice. That person beside you looks perfectly healthy but may have an underlying physical or mental health issue; your elderly neighbour has retreated into the house again. What obvious step can you take to help?

My 2½-hour wait for the booster last Friday was a doddle compared to the later four- and five-hour queues that presented a challenge for people with mobility and other issues. That was clearly not the fault of staff and volunteers who remained calm, efficient and kindly even in the face of brewing irritability. Perspective: the booster is a triumph. Case numbers are falling in those lucky groups. Fewer people will take up an ICU bed or die. Yet one rheumatologist’s timeline on Saturday was full of people giving out about the queues – “This is a free, life-saving shot. I would happily wait starkers in the snow for it,” she commented. One nurse vaccinator at Citywest arrived home exhausted having watched colleagues being told they were “bloody useless”.

“Spent a day having the head torn off me by people who had to queue . . . for a life-saving, free vaccine! Frontline workers don’t deserve the abuse they received today.”

First-world privilege is indeed a sight to behold.