As the world watches the United Kingdom roll out the first doses of Pfizer’s much-awaited COVID-19 vaccine, Martin Kenyon, a 91-year-old man living in London, has emerged as the unlikely face of the country’s efforts to instill public confidence in a vaccine.
“I rang up Guy’s Hospital, which I know very well because I’ve lived in London most of my grown-up life, and I said, ‘What’s this thing you’re doing, the vaccination?'” Kenyon told CNN in a man-on-the-street interview Tuesday, where he described the exceedingly simple process of booking his appointment that very morning.
The biggest hurdle, according to our hero, wasn’t navigating a patchwork mess of state and federal systems that, as of now, lacks the billions of dollars in funding required to deploy the vaccine. No, the hardest thing was securing a parking spot in London—that and suffering what Kenyon lamented as a “nasty lunch.”
“I’m not going to have the bloody bug now,” he continued. “I don’t intend to have it because I’ve got granddaughters and I want to live for a long time. I’m going to hug them for Christmas.” “There’s no point to dying now,” Kenyon added, “when I’ve lived this long, is there?”
It’s an incredibly charming segment. Remember it when the United States, without the enormous benefits of a centralized health care system, launches its own vaccine roll-out.
this interview wins the day pic.twitter.com/HtnjnyLZwg
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 8, 2020
