A call to arms: My year of jabbing for the NHS

From the frail and elderly to school children, Michael Harrison spent the whole of 2021 on the frontline of the vaccine drive. This is a diary of what he saw

(Tom Ford)

January 2021: “Have you ever had anaphylaxis?” “No, I’ve never even met her.” It’s my very first shift in a Covid-19 mass vaccination centre somewhere in England and I am listening to a sprightly but mischievous septuagenarian being health screened to establish he is suitable for the jab. It takes more than that to faze an ex-ward sister and so she presses on, asking him about any serious allergies, blood disorders or other medical conditions he has that we should know about. As I note down his answers and tick various boxes on my computer screen it occurs to me that after a lifetime spent mostly in newspaper offices, this is very different job.

I belong to an army of 80,000 volunteer vaccinators who have answered the call to arms though I don’t march under Boris Johnson’s banner and nor, I suspect, do many of my colleagues. Who are they? Many are retired health-care workers but these are outnumbered by vets, architects, ex-police officers, pub managers, beauty therapists, out-of-work actors and, most of all, airline staff – mainly cabin crew.

We have all completed our online training – including, bizarrely, one course teaching us how to spot and de-radicalise a would-be terrorist. And we have been taught the theory of how to vaccinate but very few of us have ever stuck a razor-sharp one-inch needle into human flesh until the first time we do it for real.