Angela Mollard: Covid vaccination should not be an optional choice
We need start seeing the Covid vaccination as a radical and necessary kindness rather than an optional choice, Angela Mollard writes.
Opinion
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A few years ago I went to Newfoundland on the east coast of Canada with the purpose of eating seal flipper pie.
It was a delicacy that had featured in Annie Proulx’s wonderful novel, The Shipping News, and while I presumed seal flippers would prove as gelatinous as eels, I was intrigued by what sort of people might discount more palatable alternatives and opt for flipper as the filling for a pie.
Sadly, the renowned pie shop was closed the day we were there but while I failed to feast on flipper I got a profound sense of the people who lived there. They were remarkable.
What I hadn’t known about these folk, with their delightful Irish-infused accents, was that they had quietly housed and supported thousands of visitors after their planes were diverted from New York as the 9/11 tragedy unfolded.
As a taxi driver called Nancy told me, they welcomed the “come-from-aways” into their homes and took them out jigging cod, and to play darts and bingo.
As the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 approaches, the story of what happened in Newfoundland has been charmingly captured in the stage musical Come From Away.
In essence it’s a story about kindness and how, when the worst happens, we instinctively default to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.
Yet watching the musical recently I realised kindness is not a bland confection birthed in The Bible and propagated by Disney princesses, but a gutsy and front-footed choice. It’s a willingness to get stuck in, to see a need and act, and to do so for the greater good rather than personal gain.
Which is why we need to stop hesitating and start seeing Covid vaccination not as an optional choice but as a radical and necessary kindness. We can blame the government rollout of the jabs all we like, we can scaremonger about blood clots all we like but if we don’t roll up our sleeves for the vaccination as a matter of urgency then we have learned nothing from the introspection and reflection that lockdown afforded us.
Vaccination may not seem like an obvious kindness. It’s not an empathetic ear in a time of trouble or a home-cooked meal delivered in a moment of strife.
Rather, it is a deep collective action which has the power to save lives and regenerate livelihoods with the same definitiveness and momentum that the pandemic wiped them out in the first place. It is also a resounding thank you: to the scientists who worked round the clock to devise a vaccine; to the doctors and nurses who put their lives on the line treating Covid patients; to the leaders who guided us through anxious and unprecedented times.
When faced with a crisis, the people of Newfoundland didn’t sit back and weigh up the options. They didn’t inflate the risks of taking strangers into their homes or trouble themselves with conspiracy theories about why the planes had flown into the World Trade Centre. Instead they operated from instinct to be the very best that humanity can be.
We were the same during the bushfires. Hearts and wallets were turned inside out as kindness, strength and camaraderie became a mass-generated antidote to suffering. So why aren’t we doing that now?
If, as social researcher Hugh McKay suggests, we were transformed by lockdown, and desire to be not just a lucky country, but a compassionate one, then why are we failing to see that being vaccinated is at the heart of our recovery, not just for the freedom it might afford but the solidarity it shows.
As he says: “The greatest asset that the human species has is our innate capacity for kindness. We’re hardwired for it. We’ve got a co-operative centre in the brain the neuroscientists now tell us.”
McKay, who recently published The Kindness Revolution, points out that kindness is not soft. Sometimes it’s tough and confronting and requires us to lean in rather than out.
It’s an ethos followed by the Jungian therapist James Hollis who says when we make personal decisions they shouldn’t be based on whether they make us happy but whether they challenge us. The question to ask ourselves, he says, is: “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?”
Choosing not to vaccinate or hesitating to get the jab diminishes us all. It smacks of pre-pandemic individualism and the sort of insular thinking which could see us rebranded from mateship-loving larrikins to shortsighted and solipsistic stalwarts of the new Hermit Kingdom.
The US and UK have not, respectively, seen 43.6 and 44.2 per cent of its eligible population vaccinated because they are being incentivised by freebies or because they’re mindless lemmings doing what they are told.
Rather, in the face of heartbreaking loss they see vaccination as a vote for the “we” not just the “me”.
In the months to come they will doubtless gain the freedoms to travel we yearn for. But, more than that, like the people of Newfoundland, they will have lit the touchpaper for the sort of kindness which will burn for decades to come.
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