By S A H RIZVI
The Times, Kuwait,
Bureau Chief – New Delhi
He had a morbid fear of hospitals after having passed through a heart surgery some years ago. Then came the co-morbidity fear during the coronavirus pandemic and yet he boldly sat in the waiting lounge at Dhahran Expo Centre in Saudi Arabia for the Pfizer vaccine shot.
Senior journalist from India, Saeed Haider working for the Al Bilad English Daily recapitulated his experience when his turn came, “ …And the lab technician jabbed the needle in my arm. In one small moment, all my fears, apprehensions and doubts waned away. I waited for my face to twitch, for temporary paralysis, or at least for a fainting spell, nothing happened.”
As he waited outside for fifteen minutes incubation time he wrote, “I was convinced haziness or a dizzy spell would follow shortly but that did not happen either. I was asked to wait for 15 minutes in a waiting lounge where already more than 200 inoculated persons were waiting for something to happen. Those fifteen minutes certainly felt equal to 24 hours. It seemed like the clock was taking sadistic pleasure in delaying every tick. My 15-minute wait eventually came to an end, and I was the conqueror, not only I, but every other person coming out of the COVID-19 Vaccine Center at Dhahran Expo was a winner, we had just taken one bold step in our fight against COVID-19.”
According to Mr. Haider, the process of inoculation started on 17 December, when the Saudi Ministry of Health urged residents and citizens to register themselves on the new online registration platform, Sehhaty, for the vaccination against COVID-19. The first consignment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had arrived in the Kingdom and the country became the first in the Arab world to roll-out the vaccine for the public.
By then, more than 500,000 people had already registered online to be vaccinated. Saudi Arabia is the second country in the Gulf Cooperation Council, after Bahrain to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine but the first to administer it to the public after its approval by the Saudi Food and Drug Authority. The vaccine is a free gift from the Saudi Government to the citizens and residents of the Kingdom.
“Just like initial denial by scores of people about the gravity of this pandemic who called it a game being played by super powers, doubts have been raised over the safety of the vaccines. Rumor mongers have had a field day with messages being exchanged on social media platforms listing ‘grievous’ side effects of the vaccines ranging from ‘paralysis, memory loss, dementia’ to ‘effecting women’s ability to conceive’,” said the journalist. He added that he had a good laugh when he heard the rumors (mis)quoting reports from Google and other search engines that “this was a conspiracy to curb child birth and control the world population.
One of several incidents that fueled these controversies was when a US nurse fainted on camera immediately after getting vaccinated. The video clip became viral on almost every social media. Later users have been sharing posts that claim that the nurse who fainted after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine is dead. Reuters has been fact-checking various false reports surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines and also reported that this claim was false. It quoted the Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Nurse Manager Tiffany Dover works, that she is well, he quotes in his article.
Reassuring images in Saudi Arabia of Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, Eastern Province Governor Saud Bin Naif and Health Minister Tawfiq Al-Rabiah taking the vaccine convinced people about safety and efficacy of the vaccine. These images and consistent campaign by the Ministry of Health allayed all fears and citizens and residents in bulk started registering,’ Haider added.
Journalist Haider said he got a call from his cardiologist friend, Dr. Abdalla Osman Eltayeb, asking him to take the vaccine at the earliest. He even prepared a two-minute video allaying all apprehensions about the vaccine. “His two minutes speech was so powerful and convincing that I immediately registered on Sehhaty App. The next day itself I got my appointment and the shot. A booster dose is scheduled for 22 January.”
Haider’s experience on the vaccine shot has been widely quoted assuring many of the expat population in Saudi Arabia.
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