I had resolved not to write anything about the disease this time. Then I met my reader in the gym. If we had run into each other before, he had praised my texts and tried to persuade me to make a book out of them. But now, I was just locked in the knee-joint stretching machine, the reader asked if I was okay; the columns were somehow different in the end.
I guessed what he meant. I’ve lost serenity. Irony. The outsider. So I talked about summer and autumn: weeks of rest heart rate 120, chattering teeth around the clock, sweats with the slightest exertion. Not a nice Baltic Sea vacation. Back at my desk, the event culminated in the most severe depression for ten years and considerations to instruct me in the slaps or to hop off the Minna-Todenhagen Bridge beforehand. Instead, I paused the column for a while. Good compromise.
Only when it got better did I realize that the racing heart had started shortly after the second Covid vaccination. I’ve heard from people who complained of similar post-vaccine symptoms. Believe it or not: Until then, I hadn’t given Comirnaty a single thought in the context of suffering. I had taken both shots lightly: what the heck, smallpox, measles, tetanus, I had them all. A vaccination psychosis can be ruled out. On the other hand, it is clear to me that the coincidence of both events can be coincidental. But the suspicion is in my head.
The wife is boosted. I did not advise my mother and in-laws against it because they were at risk. Very good to my son. I will have to be forced to take the third and all subsequent doses. Even if the chance of causality is only five percent, I won’t let it depend. That is the result of your own considerations. One can find that fearful. Irrational. But it’s my choice. It should stay that way.
Maybe this feeling creeps into my lyrics. It is difficult for me to remain fluffy when Joshua Kimmich, Sahra Wagenknecht, Harald Schmidt and countless fewer celebrities have their bodies and are nailed to the cross as weirdos and Nazi followers. I don’t feel relaxed when politicians push people with coiffed numbers at the cannulas. I lose my distance when a people’s body is imagined and exclusion is declared a civic duty. For me it is disproportionate. Corona is not the bubonic plague. Vaccination does not protect against infection or infectivity. Unvaccinated people first and foremost endanger themselves. That is what smoking couch potatoes do too.
My reader sees some things differently, but respects my perspective. That’s how it should be. “See you soon,” he said. “Hopefully,” I groaned under the weight of about five tons of steel. Because soon I will only be considered incompletely vaccinated and will hardly be allowed to use the equipment – not to protect others from me, but only to blackmail others like me. I will become fat and fill all German intensive care units at once with my bloated paunch. I remember Jens Spahn’s involuntary joke that “we” would, when all this was over, “have to forgive each other a lot”. Oh where I have to die. Then nothing.