I joined the 2 million people who accepted the offer of a booster jab this week and it was quite different to the experience of the previous two jabs. For various reasons some of the locations have changed and there was a different atmosphere. Previously I had been selected with other people in my age group and not surprisingly the people at the centre were happy to get the protection and it was all very civilised. This time it was a mixture of ages as younger people were being offered the vaccine and it was more of an experience for some of them.
I was lucky to have a guy called Josh do mine, in the space of an hour he seemed to do every task from running reception to giving jabs and calming down the more nervous. Very professional and thankfully quite happy for me to look the other way when the deed was done.
I also spoke to someone who was more than happy to volunteer and the acceptance in my area sees to be very good. He told me that he worked at different centres during the week and generally they were doing about 400 patients a day.
I have checked up on side effects and they range from none at all to flu like symptoms for a few hours and not feeling great but it all clearing up within 24 hours.
We should have realised that it had all being going a little bit too smoothly as a new variant of concern has hit the market. Omicron which I now know is the fifteenth letter of the Greek Alphabet and things have been moving on as the WHO had decided to skip Xi and Nu to make sure that certain countries were not offended.
Swift action from the government this time in order to buy time to evaluate the situation. I expect that they will end up saying that the vaccines will continue to reduce the severity of the virus but it definitely seems that this is something that we will all have to live with for some time and I don’t now think that I have had my last booster.