Vaccination fascination
Due to the months-long tumultuous vaccination race, in which shot after shot has been put – the grand prix on the circuit in Zandvoort, where there was also a lot of racing, of course not included – you can assume that 2021 will end up in the annals as a corona vaccination year.
The Netherlands started vaccinating on January 6, on the day of the violent seizure of the Capitol in Washington by Trumpists, an action that was characterized by some as a medieval battle.
The vaccination campaign has not degenerated into this, thank God, but it has been spiced, not to say peppery, sometimes with swearing back and forth between vaxers and antivaxers.
Some self-proclaimed immunologists have been treating their Twitter followers, Facebook friends, aunts and uncles to brand new theories about viruses and bacteria in recent months.
An amiable nun I met once in the morning near ‘s-Hertogenbosch, during a walk under a cloudless sky on a slope of a dirt road with a wide view over meadows and her abbey, drew from a more cheerful keg.
She called herself dryly a non-vaxer, who had been vaccinated at one of the nearby North Brabant GGDs where, she added, vaccinations were carried out non-stop.
Our exchange of ideas on vaccination gave them extra cachet with a line of poetry by the 19th-century preacher-poet De Génestet, who died at the age of 31 of tuberculosis, an infectious disease, bacterial in nature, which still haunts the world.
I think, she said humbly, what he thinks and perhaps you think so too: the art is to fight with a mild smile as if you were not fighting.
Wim Daniels, 2021
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