A courageous column about the most important issue ever. Yes, that’s what I’d enjoy writing

By Ed Goldman

If you’ve submitted to one or two anti-COVID vaccinations, you’ve probably had one or more of these reactions:

1. Zero discomfort of any sort.

2. A headache and/or mild fever—causing you to believe, once the unpleasantness passed a day or so later, you now had superpowers.

But at least four of my friends (yes, that number has more than doubled in recent years) warned me that my likely reaction to the second shot would be nothing less than sob-inducing.

I’d probably suffer (a) intensely vibrating chills, (b) the kind of migraine headache that would have people say of me afterward, “He’d seemed sort of despondent lately” and (c) a spontaneous rash on my right ankle —or on both ankles, since I’m ambidextrous (except for my left hand).

One friend tried to reassure me by saying, “When it happens, just remember it means the shot is working.” Of all the panic attacks disguised as consumer alerts, this proved by far the worst thing I was told. 

It started when the nurse who administered my shot was so skilled that while I thought she was still rubbing a drop of alcohol on my arm, she was actually injecting me with the Pfizer serum. When I told her so, she was thrilled—and may have asked for a letter of recommendation or an affidavit, but my memory gets a bit sketchy when I’m behaving like a bwave widdle soldier.

After I got home, and for the next several hours, I didn’t experience any symptoms of a negative reaction. In fact, I detected a dollop of euphoria requesting entry into my psyche, which at first made me think this could be the previously unrecognized (and as of this moment, branded) Pfizer Epffect. I could almost hear Mary Poppins singing:

“A hypo of medicine makes the sugar high expand
The sugar high expand-and
A better high than planned.
Just a shotpful of Pfizer and your mood pfeels back in hand
In a most delightpful way.” ☂️

I’ll admit that around 2:30 in the morning I started experiencing some troubling weariness. But as I crawled into bed, I reminded myself I had just imbibed a few vodka martinis to congratulate myself on having been a bwave widdle soldier—and that it was, after all, 2:30 in the morning.

I talked it over with a dear friend the next afternoon (when, let’s be clear, I had just awakened) and she said, half-jokingly, “Maybe you didn’t really get the vaccine.” I half-chuckled—but (again, let’s be clear) suddenly excused myself a few moments later to bolt to the bathroom, tear off my injection Band-Aid and examine my arm with an intensity similar to when Dr. Van Helsing checks out Mina Harker’s neck for puncture wounds in “Dracula.”

Sure enough, there was a single tiny puncture mark just above my bicep, meaning either I’d been successfully inoculated or had been the nocturnal victim of a vampire with a missing fang. (For younger readers: This fang might have fallen out due to the vampire’s advanced gingivitis. I urge you to floss.)

Not long ago, President Biden, Dr,. Fauci, the CDC and a podiatrist I met in a Starbucks line gave me and a number of double-vaxxed seniors permission to wander around maskless outdoors—provided we take certain precautions like never attending an indoor marionette performance, a wedding reception held in a janitor closet or a Capitol Hill insurrection (the latter would be okay if I brought along two forms of identification and wore a hat with moose horns).