Pleasant old man gets COVID vaccine: "I hope that I'm not going to have the bloody bug now"

After months and months of waiting, the COVID-19 vaccine is starting to become publicly available. CNN broadcast from London yesterday to cover this historic moment and happened upon Martin Kenyon, a 91-year old man who’s among the first people in the United Kingdom to receive the vaccination. He’s also a really good interview subject.

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Kenyon is shown explaining the process of getting a vaccination appointment—a process he calls “not very interesting.” Kenyon says he telephoned London’s Guy’s Hospital, asked if he could get the shot, and then… went and got it. “It didn’t hurt at all,” he says. The biggest pain was trying to find a parking spot and the “rather nasty lunch” he had before receiving the shot. When asked how he feels about being one of the first people in the world to get the vaccine, Kenyon responds: “I don’t think I feel about it at all, except that I hope I’m not going to have the bloody bug now.”

“I don’t intend to have it because I have granddaughters and I want to live a long time to enjoy their lives,” he continues. He goes on to explain more about the vaccination and shows off his follow-up appointment card, which, in his words, is “very unexciting” to look at. Before the end of the interview, he says he “doesn’t intend to have [the virus.]”

“Well, there’s no point in dying now when I have lived this long, is there?” Kenyon adds. “I don’t plan to anyway.”

Not only is Kenyon a great advertisement for the benefits of not being a total numbskull and letting medical experts protect you from a deadly virus, but his story also illustrates that it’s more than possible for a country to make it so the biggest headache of arranging a vaccination is the fact that hospital parking can be hard to find.

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