Covid-19 vaccine: Don’t let doubt defeat hope

Inoculation will ensure us the safety we have been hoping for all this while.

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Published: Mon 18 Jan 2021, 11:20 PM

Last year, our lives came to a halt. Homes became new offices, fistbumps replaced handshakes and masks became our passport to access the world outside. But that wasn’t the worst disruption. The thousands of deaths and hospitalisations were. The pandemic claimed lives, and impacted many more. When it did not affect physical health, Covid-19 took a toll on mental health. When it did not claim human lives, its worst casualties were small businesses that were forced to close down due to the economic strain the virus put on industries. Sectors such as hospitality and tourism struggled to stay afloat as lockdowns were announced and social distancing reduced our movement from one part of the world to another. As we were confronted with the most unpredictable time in our lives, a flicker of hope had us believe there would be an end to the pandemic.

The vaccine is a means to that end. And it is to the UAE’s credit that an immunisation drive has been put in place to fight this public health crisis. Once the Covid-19 vaccines were developed, experts foresaw the challenge that their distribution would be. Take, for instance, the distribution mess that the US is faced with, where boxes of Pfizer vaccines are reportedly lying in storage because the mass inoculation drive has not been implemented judiciously. The UAE, on the other hand, had drawn a strategic plan to first vaccinate frontliners (as had been the norm in many countries) before making the vaccines available to a larger population. The authorities have kept their word, and now it’s our turn.


The daily numbers have been on the rise and it’s a matter of time before the virus rears its ugly head again. Inoculation will ensure us the safety we have been hoping for all this while. Sceptics find themselves wondering whether the vaccines are safe enough or if they will alter something in the long run. Others will wait for their friends and foes to take it before they opt for inoculation themselves. What we easily omit from these contentions is that the vaccines have been developed after months of thorough research and trials. Hundreds of people across the world have taken these vaccines to protect themselves against Covid-19. Not only have any major side-effects not been found, these vaccines have also been reported to be effective against the new variants.

At a time when scientific and geopolitical experts are pondering over which worlds will receive the vaccine first, there is a lot to feel reassured about the UAE’s mass immunisation drive. We cannot let our cynicism get in the way of hope. We cannot let the virus win.



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