Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

We need a dose of vaccine realism

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One of my geniuses as both a commentator and a character is to confront what for most normal people amounts to unqualified good news and immediately spot the downside. I’m a professional party-pooper.

Hence, as promising early results from three major Covid vaccine trials inspire a flurry of jubilant metaphors about tunnels and cavalry, your downer columnist glowers — for the New York Times didn’t tag Shriver ‘the Cassandra of American letters’ for nothing. Beware, warns this killjoy crank, allowing your minders to keep you in confinement ‘just a little bit longer’ and then you’ll be let out to play. Like the classic carrot dangling before a donkey’s nose, an indeterminate short time is still out of reach, and in this sense doesn’t effectively vary from a long time from now.

With an end to this farce ostensibly in sight, effective vaccines might seem to redeem lockdowns and their euphemistic ‘tier’ equivalents. See? We needn’t learn to ‘live with’ Covid-19. We’ll all get poked in the arm, and then the boogievirus will go away. Until then, keep the faith, baby. All these overbearing restrictions on your liberty, the gory wounding of the economy, the obscene overspending by the Treasury, and the horrific knock-on effects for other grave health conditions? Lo, such minor inconveniences are temporary, so put a sock in it.

Well, everything is temporary, is it not? Life is temporary. Which is why what’s now guaranteed to be a full year of our lives being blighted by misguided governmental arm-twisting constitutes no small loss. On average, we’ve only 81 of these annual sovereigns to spend, and many of us have already drained our mortality accounts to spare change. So for God’s sake let’s not extend that blight to two years.

See? We’ll all get poked in the arm and the boogievirus will go away.

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