For those who are vaccine-hesitant

Artwork by Roulé Le Roux of www.unfold.co.za

Content warning: frank discussion of what it's like to die of Covid, or experience Long Covid; likely to distress anyone who’s lost a loved one to Covid.

If we’re lucky, if we’re in the right age group, if we’re privileged enough to have access to the internet and a smartphone, and a nearby vaccine site, we can be protected against this viral monster rampaging through our communities. And yet every day I talk to people in despair because people they love — parents and other family members — are resisting the jab. In such cases, we’re encouraged to be encouraging, not judgmental. To ask people why they’re hesitant, to understand why they’re anxious, and why their anxiety is taking this particular form. It doesn’t help to grind our teeth when they tell us about “this video my friend sent me on WhatsApp”.

But I am here to tell you why you shouldn’t delay one more minute. I have the second most compelling reason why you should get vaccinated if you have so much as a sniff of a chance. My sister (healthy, no comorbidities) almost died of Covid during the second wave, spending a staggering 65 days in ICU, undergoing a dozen medical procedures as her magnificent care team struggled to save her life: induced coma, ventilation, bronchoscopy, tracheotomy, full blood transfusion, and more. In one photograph taken after she was starting to recover, I counted nine tubes going into her body, hooking her up to six machines. She had an oxygen mask clamped to her face for so long, it broke her nose. I could (and will) go on.

But the most compelling reason is that thousands of families have lost loved ones, in the most appalling circumstances: unable to hold their hands, unable to say goodbye, unable to huddle together with friends for comfort. And so much of that anguish and loss could have been spared if we had had vaccines available before the first and second waves hit, and the vulnerable could have been protected. Imagine how those devastated families must feel, seeing people who have access to a vaccine refusing something that could have saved the lives of the parents and spouses and children they loved, who will never be coming home again.

So I am going to be honest, and not fudge around with euphemisms, as we tend to do when talking about death and dread disease. Let me lay out what it is you’re risking, by describing (from first-hand experience) what Covid might do to you. And your family.

First, let’s talk about the likelihood of your dying or being seriously disabled by Covid. Imagine a small cocktail party, with twenty of your most beloved friends and family present. Now imagine all of you get Covid. Know this: one of you WILL die, and another two will be horribly disabled or impaired, possibly for life. Try to pick those people, see their faces. That’s the absolute, inescapable reality of Covid without vaccines. In fact, you can do this exercise with the ten people you love most in the world; if infected, one will die, two will be disabled. In the twenty-person scenario, I'm working with the most conservative, first-wave figures, in which 5% of Covid-infected died, and 10% got long Covid. According to the latest stats for the delta variant, the South African recovery rate is under 90% (in other words, over 10% are dying — source: NCID); and in the UK, where they're tracking Long Covid, they’re starting to suspect that as many as 20% develop this awful condition (source: Imperial College London study).

This is what happens when someone dies (or, in our case, almost dies) of Covid. One bleak blessing, explained to me by a doctor, is that at least it’s not a painful death: you will most likely be in a coma, actual or induced, at the time. But know this: it is a terrifying and unbearably lonely death. Survivors who remember being ventilated speak of the overwhelming panic, first of not being able to breathe, and then of their terror as grim doctors approach with mask and machine. And if you get the delta variant, which often spells uncontrollable diarrhoea, you’ll likely die in a puddle of your own mess.

The worst, though, is the loneliness. As you fight to suck air into your lungs, waiting for a ventilator to become available, you’ll be desperate for a loving, familiar face. There will be none. There is no place lonelier than a Covid ICU ward. People around you will be dying, and there will be no one to hold your hand, or speak words of reassurance and comfort. The nurses will try to do what they can, but they will be rushed off their feet, and numb with trauma.

Now imagine the whole thing from the perspective of your family. Once you’re delirious or sedated, you’re as lost to them as if you were on the dark side of the moon. Awful truths we learned the hard way: the first rule of Covid ward is, don’t phone the Covid ward. (They won’t answer anyway.) Regulations mean that once someone is in ICU, ONLY their doctor may speak to ONLY the next-of-kin. Your next-of-kin will get one rushed two-minute call from an exhausted doctor every 24 hours (if you’re lucky — on six separate days when my sister’s condition was critical, we didn’t get a call at all, which caused my elderly parents such anguish, I still can’t bear to recall it).

But there’s worse to come: did you know that before they can switch off the ventilator, the hospital needs the family’s consent? So there’s one thing more awful than not getting a call: the calls to warn you that this decision is imminent. You cannot know the terror and dread with which your loved ones will clutch their phones, the sick horror they’ll feel every time it chirps or buzzes — the chimes of WhatsApp messages from numbers I haven’t yet muted still trigger panic attacks. Also, have you thought about how one gathers together to let go of someone dying of a highly infectious and potentially deadly disease? Yup, family Zoom call or similar. If you’re lucky, a nurse will hold up a phone so your immediate family can see you for the last time. IMAGINE THE HORROR. Do not, I beg you, choose to risk putting your family through this mill.

There’s another matter that you may not have considered: what all this will cost. My sister’s hospital bills amounted to the price of a small house. She was lucky enough to have Rolls-Royce health insurance: if you don’t, you risk beggaring yourself, or your estate, or your family. Even if you have medical aid, the costs are so staggering that the co-payments alone could wipe you out financially.

But let’s say you get Covid, and you don’t die. So it’s just like flu, right? WRONG. You stand a ten to twenty per cent chance of developing a condition known as post-acute Covid syndrome, or Long Covid (I call it LoCo). I have this. I got my first Covid symptoms on 23 March 2020. Over 15 months later, I am still sick, with no end in sight. There are dismaying reports coming out of the UK and the US (where there are millions of LoCo sufferers) suggesting that the condition may be chronic.

Let me tell you what long Covid will do to your life. It will blow a crater in your path to the future. It will end your career, or put it on hold indefinitely. It will eviscerate you financially. It will put almost intolerable strain on your family and relationships. It makes it very difficult to care for your small children. You may end up dependent on family, both to pay the bills and care for you; if you value your independence, you can wave it goodbye. You can expect to live with, in no particular order, an endless cycle of chest pains, breathlessness, persistent cough, racing heart, insomnia, night sweats, headaches, hair loss (my eyelashes fell out over a year ago, and show no signs of growing back), extreme joint and muscle pain (so bad it will wake you at night), huge hard cold sores, cuts and scratches that won't heal, nausea, diarrhoea, itching, rashes, double and blurred vision, sicca syndrome, loss of taste and smell, extreme clumsiness (constant tripping and falling, dropping things and breaking them), and more. The recurring or chronic pain leads to depression and other mental health problems. In the US, Long Covid is responsible for an uptick in opioid addiction, as sufferers beg their doctors for pain relief.

Maybe the worst is the fog and the flattening exhaustion, with many days when you won’t be able to get out of bed. The weakness that can render you helpless. All the small pleasures of your life, whatever they may be — bridge or chess games, walking and gardening, watching series or reading, your favourite foods or tipple — are stripped away by your inability to find the energy for even the smallest tasks. Some LoCo sufferers are seriously impaired: they need wheelchairs or walkers, they experience loss of vision and hearing, strokes, heart conditions, kidney failure. In the UK, so far one in twelve LoCo patients is dying of these complications. There is NO treatment or cure for any of this yet (I am managed by a brilliant infectious diseases specialist, one of South Africa’s early Covid experts, I research the condition continually, and I. Have. Tried. Everything. Nothing has worked so far.) Especially if you’re elderly, is this how you want to spend the rest of your life?

You’re welcome to refuse the vaccine or talk about “personal choice” if you are a hermit, with no family or friends who care about you, can isolate yourself so that you never go near another human being again, and are willing to sign a waiver refusing medical treatment should you become so ill as to need hospitalisation. But I’m assuming you have people who love you. And telling them any of the following is not going to reassure them.

1) “But my reiki practitioner/yoga teacher/etc says I have a strong immune system.” This bug is the ultimate form of Russian roulette. Frail and elderly folk are bouncing through Covid; healthy young marathon runners are dying on ventilators. You have NO idea how your system will respond, and you don’t want to find out the hard way.
2) “But I’m protected by the ivermectin I’m taking.” Doctors tell me that much of the ivermectin people are buying on the streets takes the form of sugar pills or saline drops. Your local dealer is laughing like a hyena all the way to the bank. But you might be the lucky ones; if you’re taking the real thing long-term without a medical history to check your liver function (the drug is hepatotoxic to some), watch out for possible hepatitis, cirrhosis or a liver transplant down the line.
3) “I could die in a car accident.” Maybe, but you can’t get vaccinated against car accidents.
4) “If my time is up, it’s up.” Yes, but you can CHOOSE not to die this awful, isolated way, which will heap extra trauma onto your already devastated family — and land them with a whopping great bill to boot. 5) “We need to find out more — I’d like to hear all sides.” Vaccines have been a near-miraculous health intervention for 150 years: they are why you did not die of smallpox or polio or tetanus as a child. This is not the time to start “digging deeper” (code for watching too many YouTube videos featuring the word “sheeple”). Do you really want to hear the side of folk like the American doctor who told a hearing that she’d heard of vaccinated people becoming magnetised, with spoons and forks clinging to their bodies? (I hope they took away her licence to practice medicine.)
6) “I’m worried about side-effects.” Like ALL meds, vaccines have side-effects, and these will affect people differently. A tiny handful of people can’t have them because of allergies, which is why you need to present your medical history, and remain on site for 20 mins in the extremely rare likelihood of anaphylactic reaction. I was extremely unwell after being vaccinated (this is apparently to be expected in LoCo patients); but being able to reassure my 80-something parents that they no longer had to worry about me dying on a ventilator was worth several days of feeling even ghastlier than usual.

Vaccines are not a perfect tool, and researchers are scrambling to keep up as the bug develops new and even deadlier variants, but they’re the best weapon we have at the moment. In the US, 90% of Covid hospital admissions and 98% of Covid deaths are now in the unvaccinated population. This was confirmed today by the NHS report that while vaccinated citizens in the UK are still falling ill from the highly infectious delta variant, few of them need hospitalisation, and almost none are dying. Yes, you need to do your part: wear a mask, sanitise, follow social distancing rules, take Vit C, D and zinc (so says my specialist). But in the final analysis, your best shot at NOT DYING is the jab.

There are breadwinners all over this country who wake in dread every morning, wondering if today is the day the virus will strike, robbing them and their families of life and health and joy. They don’t qualify for the vaccine yet, and who knows when our meagre supplies will run out. These folk are dying (some of them will literally die) for the opportunity you have presented to you on a plate. Please do not risk the fate of the much-loved chef Lesego Semenya, who died ONE DAY before he was eligible to register, something likely to torment his loved ones.

BTW, I’ve been reading up on vaccine supply to SA: it’s clear that we’re soon going to be experiencing supply chain and distribution problems and shortages of vaccines courtesy of government bungling, so we can’t even take our current limited access to vaccines for granted. (Update 15 July: the vaccination programme has now been disrupted by (un)civil chaos, so even more NB to get yours while you can.)

So if you qualify, please PLEASE go get jabbed. TODAY. Do not risk what we went through. What I’m going through. None of the words above can convey anything like the full horror of our experience. I wouldn’t wish a day, even an hour of it, on my worst enemy.

Artwork update: Roulé le Roux, a stranger to me, supports the message here so strongly that she offered to create an original work for this post, for free. Her arresting image captures with eerie accuracy what it is to live tethered with dread and hope to one’s phone. I am so grateful to her, and urge you to visit the Unfold website.