Matthew Abraham: Let’s hope the vaccine is our passport out of this state of madness and paranoia

Every Covid step you take, every Covid sound you make, they’re watching you. Hopefully the vaccine will put an end to all this madness, writes Matthew Abraham.

The woman frantically packing her own bag at the local German-owned supermarket hissed a one word insult.

“Covid,” she said to the customer next in line, absently-mindedly crowding her space. That customer was me, who’d committed the new crime of stepping over the magic one-and-a-half metre yellow Covid lines on the floor.

The checkout operator waved me back and I obliged, of course. “But I'm vaccinated,” I blurted out to the woman who was by now heading toward the store's exit. “Are you?” I wanted to ask.

From behind her perspex cone of silence, the checkout operator twice demanded to know what I’d said. When I explained that I was talking to the customer she pressed a button on her headset and said: “It's OK, he wasn't talking to me.” Wow.

How close had I come to being frogmarched out the door by the people monitoring their customers from behind the one-way glass? Never joke about bombs at the airport, never step out of line at the checkout.

Welcome to Paranoid Plaza, conveniently located in the world's third most liveable city, where every Covid step you take, every Covid sound you make, they're watching you.

How are we ever going to escape this madness? Will getting vaccinated be our passport to normality? This is the big question our Premier, Steven Marshall – indeed all Premiers – need to answer very clearly.

During the week, the Australian Medical Association’s president, Dr Omar Khorshid, said governments should consider travel and other freedoms for fully-vaccinated Australians, possibly using a digital certificate as immunisation proof.

“If you don't like lockdowns, get vaccinated, if you don't like border closures, get vaccinated, if you want to travel internationally, go and get vaccinated,” he told the National Press Club.

Ten days ago my wife and I had our first AstraZeneca shots, with the second vaccine booked in the stipulated three months’ time come late August.

We sat in a large room at our local GP clinic with around 20 others, waiting to roll up our sleeves.

The occasion felt like a flashback to grade 7 at Christian Brothers College in Wakefield Street, when our class formed a disorderly line in the asphalt yard to get vaccinated against contracting tuberculosis.

Like lambs running through a sheep dip trough, we were jabbed before we had a chance to bleat and spent the next week comparing who had the biggest lumps on our injection sites. No bribes of free Chupa Chups to suck on in those days. We did it tough.

Thanks to that public health program, most children no longer need to be vaccinated for TB, apart from high-risk groups in immigrant and Indigenous communities, because the infection rate in the general population is so low.

Our AstraZeneca injection process was more orderly, as you'd expect from a cohort of grade 7s now pushing 70.

A doctor informed the waiting room of the likely common “adverse effects” from the vaccine over the next three or four days and the “very rare but real risk” of blood clots developing between four and 30 days, and then we were called in for our shots, either as couples or individuals.

The injection itself was completely painless. The “adverse effects” can be lethargy, muscle pain, headaches, fever, pain at the injection site, fatigue, nausea and dizziness.

It's a mystery why SA Health feels the need to keep banging on about “adverse effects” which aren’t terribly adverse at all.

Here's some breaking news for them straight from the horse's mouth. If you're over 60, then fatigue, lethargy, muscle pain, headaches and dizziness aren’t “adverse effects”, they're normal everyday life.

In the four days after receiving the vaccine, I had a few slight headaches and kept dozing off in front of The Great British Sewing Bee on the box and that’s about it. My wife experienced some aches and pains.

I woke up on the first couple of nights with a raging thirst and had some odd dreams, one featuring a large white squid. Go for it, Sigmund Freud.

I have, however, experienced a totally unexpected and welcome side effect. For the first time since the start of this pandemic, I feel protected from coronavirus and that feels great.

True, we won’t be fully protected until we’ve had the second shot, but the first vaccination does provide a significant shield against getting seriously sick from Covid-19.

Whether it will provide protection against Covid fear and loathing at the checkout, and at our state borders, is another question entirely.