Mark Brown and Vicky Walker spoke to volunteer vaccinator Sach at Downham Vaccination Hub in July 2021.
TRANSCRIPT:
MB: This is Mark Brown for Lewisham Vaccination Stories outside of Downham Health and Leisure Centre on a slightly overcast, but still very, very warm early July day. We’ve been doing a vaccination clinic here. I’m here with my Lewisham Vaccination Stories colleague.
VW: Hello.
MB: And also one of our fellow volunteers.
S: [Sach]. Hi.
MB: So, Sach, you’re a volunteer. I think you’ve been a volunteer for ages. Why have you been a volunteer during this amazing vaccination effort?
S: Probably two main reasons. The first is during the COVID pandemic I had lost people I have known to COVID, which was, obviously, very sad. And I wanted to contribute or feel like I was making a contribution to at least making others get better or feel better from the COVID pandemic itself.
The second is associated with just listening to some of the developers of the vaccines themselves, most notably Sarah Gilbert, now Dame Sarah Gilbert, and listening to her life story about the creation of what we know as the AstraZeneca vaccine today, I think was utterly inspirational.
I think both of those things together made me almost feel compelled that I had to try to do my bit to facilitate the rollout of this vaccination and halt the — or at least reduce the spread of the vaccine and bring an end to the pandemic.
MB: Because thinking back to, kind of, January this year, it was a very, very dark and bleak time. I think it’s really easy to forget just how much fear and loss and horror people felt at that time. How did that feel for you then? Back before we knew we had something that might actually sort this problem out?
S: I guess it was incredibly surreal, because you can see it happening in countries before it started happening in the UK. You could almost feel this impending doom of it coming closer and closer towards the UK. Although the nations it was hitting prior to that was very, very sad.
I think watching the scenes of doctors in overcrowded hospitals, you know, primarily Italy, I suppose, was where we had a lot of pictures for, it was a surreal kind of experience just trying to comprehend what was going on. But, also, a terrifying one.
Yes, I mean, I think it’s very hard to put into words what you were observing and how that felt, because in my lifetime, I’m in my late 40s, I’ve never known anything like it nor any of my — the generation above that I’d spoken to who have really experienced anything like it. So, it was a combination of both of those things.
MB: Yes, it was a very, very bleak time. Vicky, do you want to ask any questions more specifically about the nuts and bolts of vaccination?
VW: I do, because when — we probably both started volunteering around the same time and we graduated from ushering people up and down the hallway to typing in the computer details. Now we are both volunteer vaccinators. So, I know that I started doing that a month or so before you. How did you decide that you wanted to actually become a vaccinator?
S: Yes. Again, it was probably like the answer to the first question. It was associated with this need of feeling compelled to do something. I think being on the — closer to the actual administering of the vaccine made me almost feel more associated with trying to bring to an end the pandemic.
As I say, in this particular case, listening to how the developers had come up with the vaccines themselves and trying to allay people’s fears as was clearly the case, certainly, in the early days of administering the vaccine, I thought was an important part to play in the whole role of becoming a volunteer vaccinator.
I think the other thing that’s worth mentioning, which doesn’t get commented on that much, is the NHS website where you have to go through the learning experience of understanding how vaccines work in general, but also specifically how the current COVID vaccines work is an immense learning tool and from a personal point of view, just getting a better understanding of what this disease is and how we’re combating it, was also personally helpful.
You know, I would just recommend, even if you don’t want to become a vaccinator, it’s a remarkable tool to just learn about this world around us and learn about this — in my opinion, devastating disease.
MB: So, thinking back to — across the last six months or so, what do you think you’ll always remember? When you are past your middle age, into your dotage, and you’re sitting telling stories, what stories do you think you’ll tell people about this time, this thing that we’ve all been involved in?
S: I don’t know if I’ll tell the stories, necessarily, but I will tell you what sticks in my mind in a way that will be hard to erase, which, to some extent, I think, appears to be very much a British or a UK-centric thing, which was the pulling together of a volunteer-type force that really created the roll-out of the vaccination programme as we know it.
I don’t know that there are many other nations that have relied so extensively on the community, as it were, as an institution to roll-out a vaccine programme. They’ve generally relied on existing other systems to do it. These were a group of people who didn’t know anything about vaccinations or how to do things or how to roll things out.
And watching those groups of people make it work, even in a small sense for what we see at Downham is a remarkable inspirational view on humanity and an incredible view on people’s resilience in the face of, at the time, what you would call the unknown, to make the world a better place.
Yes, I don’t think I’ll ever forget seeing that side of people and that side of humanity.
MB: That was amazing. Thank you.