Gene Gets a Shot in the Arm: “This Is Not a Sane System. It Filled Me With Joy, But Also Guilt.”

From a column by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post Magazine headlined “Gene gets a shot in the arm”:

I just got the coronavirus vaccine because of some weird national system that seems to give preference to people who are already half-dead. I don’t mean to be morbid or ungrateful, but at 69, statistically speaking, the vaccine will probably allow me to exist only through the first Kamala Harris administration. If they gave it to an infant, we are talking about 80 years. How does this make sense? . . .

However. I am glad I got the shot. It was not easy. My girlfriend and I were doing a crossword puzzle online when I got an email alert that 1,500 shots were instantly available in the District of Columbia. . . .She elbowed me off the computer — she is younger than I am and way faster at the keyboard — and completed the questionnaire requesting a shot without once consulting me, as though she were filling out a veterinary form for a dog. Exactly 40 seconds after hitting “Enter,” and learning I had an appointment, I got another email saying all spots were filled.

This is not a sane system, obviously. It filled me with joy, but also guilt. I was jonesing for the shot — like a lot of people, I had vaccine envy. It is not admirable. The Germans probably have a word for it. Call it shottennfreude. . . .

Bogarting one of the scarce doses of the vaccine in a store filled with young people, who had to go about their business as yet unprotected, made me uneasy. The only guy older than me was getting the shot too. He was in his mid-70s, frail-looking and suicidal. . . .As we sat together in the waiting room I was moved enough to interject. “Hang in there,” I said. “We only get one shot at life.”. . .

The shot made me a little sick for a couple of days, and I still have to go back for a follow-up later in the month, and that fills me with a particular dread, because my job now is to stay healthy for another six weeks until full immunity kicks in. Huge pressure. Anxiety. I am afraid of choking, like a basketball player who’s made the first of two free throws but still needs to sink the second for the win.