As I write this in August 2021, 83 per cent of our adult population is fully vaccinated and that will rise to around 90 per cent. Ireland’s vaccine rollout has been a huge success story, ranked among the best in the world. We can all be very proud of both the logistics and the fact we put our trust in science as the main way to beat COVID-19. Globally, over four billion people have had a vaccine, more than half of the world’s population, and all in less than nine months. These are very impressive figures, and they hopefully herald a return to the lives we all want to live.
On 30 July 2021, I managed to play some music live with The Metabollix. We hadn’t played together in the one room since March 2020. We were well spaced out (physically speaking), and the performance was recorded for a special video to be sent to the alumni of Trinity College Dublin, who would normally be invited to spend a weekend, usually in August, in their old college. COVID-19 had yet again put paid to that, but Trinity wanted to maintain the connection with their graduates, so they filmed various performances at different locations on the campus.
We were filmed in Trinity’s iconic Exam Hall, where there was plenty of room and a lot of ventilation. Looking down on us were paintings of notable figures from years gone by, including one of Elizabeth I, who had founded Trinity in 1592. I’m not sure what she made of the rock music we blasted out.
I felt like Rip Van Winkle. Rip features in a short story by American writer Washington Irving. He is a Dutch-American villager in a colony in the Catskill Mountains. He meets mysterious Dutchmen (are there any other kind?) and drinks some liquor with them. He falls asleep and wakes up 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.
We are all Rip Van Winkles now. Slowly waking up from what feels like a long sleep. We have been through the worst pandemic in over 100 years, if not ever, that wreaked havoc all over the world. However, the deployment of the most powerful vaccines ever invented means that we have SARS-CoV-2 on the run. COVID-19 is now a preventable disease because of vaccination. But that didn’t always seem certain, and, as you will have read, I was hugely relieved last November when the first – that made by Pfizer/BioNTech – of several vaccines showed remarkable efficacy in the clinical trial that tested it.
But there is more to be done. We need to get more vaccines to poorer countries not only to reduce the numbers dying from COVID-19 but also to stop variants of the virus emerging, which is our remaining major scientific concern. Variants have arisen that can break through the vaccines but, so far, not to the extent of causing severe disease and death. Booster shots are likely to be needed to maintain immunity, and those boosters may well involve variant-specific vaccines, a bit like the flu vaccine, which changes every year. Because of vaccines and better hospital treatments, COVID-19 will become a largely manageable disease.
From all the science that has been done, we know the rules of the game when it comes to COVID-19, and we can continue to use that knowledge in the ongoing fight, which isn’t quite over yet. Like Rip Van Winkle, we must get used to a changed world. Many of us have suffered, physically and mentally, and we need to look out for each other now more than ever.
I am so proud of all that science has achieved and hope we learn from this for the future challenges that we will no doubt face, be it another pandemic or that hugely important issue: climate change.
We have come through one of the most dramatic periods in living memory, and through our scientific ingenuity and care for one another we will prevail.