Take the Vaccine immediately, you selfish little cockroach

Let me introduce you to ‘shove’ theory

I see you.

Your pale face lit by the orangey red glow of your laptop. Some add on you have installed, some notion about reducing your exposure to blue light during your midnight web-surfing sessions.  Some pathetic attempt to stop yourself waking up past noon again, the shameful shuffle past your resentful parents working from home as you crawl into the shower to wash off your crusted ‘nocturnal emissions’. 

You think you’ve got us all outsmarted. Vaccine passports? Fine, it’s not like anybody invites you out anyway. Your monthly instalments of Universal Credit will cover your Video Game microtransactions for the foreseeable future, allowing you to ‘kill time’ for the next half a year of your precious, irreplaceable youth.

Then comes the Spring again. Finally, the ‘all-clear’ from Whitehall. Coronavirus is completely over, and the government will give up all of its emergency powers (this will definitely happen). You’ll be allowed to emerge from your cocoon of Uber Eats deliveries for your precious midnight trips to the petrol station to buy cheap alcohol and two for one deal on big bags of crisps. Sans-Vaccine.

Why can’t you just be a good team-player?

Look, young or old, we are all in this together. While Coronavirus may have only harmed the elderly and infirm for the most part, the side effects of these vaccines can kill any of us.

When you take your first dose of Astra Zeneca, you have just as much chance as an eighty-three-year-old as getting a blood clot in your brain and dying. There is something beautiful about that, bringing us together in a time of division. A bit like the Blitz.

No, either we all march slowly together across no man’s land into the razor wire and machine guns, or none of us go at all. And it is of vital strategic importance that we capture these thirty-five metres of Flemish mud.

Whatever the cost.

I suspect, dear reader, that a white feather from a young woman would do little to summon your esprit de corps. Some excitement I expect, for even the slightest shred of attention from the opposite sex. Only a man with a reputation can feel shame. After fifteen years of ritual humiliation in compulsory education, your dignity died long ago. 

No. There is no home front for this deadly virus. We are all, each of us, in the midst of battle. But the virus doesn’t want to play football (what a breath of fresh air that would be).

The penalty for desertion is summary execution. By lethal injection. No, not the vaccine, the other type.

It is firm, but by Jove, it is fair.