Government pricks

Five months after I registered to be vaccinated against COVID-19, I finally got jabbed last week, and received the Mercedes Benz of vaccines currently available in Egypt, Johnson and Johnson. Lucky me!!!

The day began at 5 am with the weird text that the Health Ministry sends to summon people for the vaccine: “Sarah, please go to the vaccination office for international travelers on August 12 between 3 and 9 pm”. The informality of the first name without the honorific commonly used in Arabic makes it sound like your mum asking you to get some eggs on the way home.

I was nonetheless excited to receive the summons. I initially registered for (any) vaccine in March. After waiting nearly two months, I received an appointment but got the virus five days before. I re-registered a month afterward and heard nothing while virtually everyone in my network got jabbed. As someone who runs a gym, and who has been forced to offer Zoom training sessions only, it was extremely frustrating. There are only so many times a person can stand to say “hang on you’ve frozen” in one lifetime.

When I heard about Johnson & Johnson and allegedly Pfizer being offered in Egypt I was PUMPED. I ultimately would have taken any vaccine offered to me, but given that Johnson and Johnson is approved in the UK and AstraZeneca's use is restricted there, I am hoping that it will make travel to the UK easier once Egypt is removed from the red list. 

The appointment was for August 12 and was sent on August 12, lending it a certain secret mission urgency. It also shat over any and all plans I may have had because my plans are not important. 

I immediately limbered up my fingers to repeatedly dial the Covid hotline, hoping to perhaps get through on the 18th try. I eventually gave up and thought what the hell, I’ll press 2 for English. I did that and got through immediately, which is a handy lifehack for the unvaccinated masses in Egypt amongst you, you’re welcome.

I asked the man at the other end where the vaccination office for international travelers is. He replied that he did not know. Which was a curveball to say the least. In that case, I said, where am I supposed to go? He repeated that they did not have the address, and that I should call the Health Ministry hotline. Summoning up my inner Karen, I asked to speak to his manager, which was an ambitious request at 5 am on a national holiday. I then asked him whether he did not think that this is terrible service. There was a pause, and he said no. 

I called the Health Ministry hotline twice. The first time, I was told to go to a place in Giza. The second time, the woman I spoke to suggested that it might be near downtown Cairo. On neither occasion did either person I spoke to sound very confident. I mean honestly maybe it was an unreasonable request to ask the government where it put its vaccination centers. Sometimes I forget where I put my keys.

In the end my friend J’s husband came to the rescue with a link from the Al-Watan news website with the name and addresses of all the vaccination offices for international travelers. First on the list was the Grand Continental Hotel in downtown’s Opera Square which J and I agreed was our kind of vibe as we’re fancy. We had visions of being inoculated while having a pedicure, which I cannot believe no one has snapped up as a business idea.

On my way to the Grand Continental, J informed me that she had arrived in Opera Square, and that the hotel had been demolished. Super. We decided to go to the center near Giza Square. I arrived first and saw a small group of masked individuals looking simultaneously bored and perplexed which is the hallmark of an Egyptian citizen dealing with bureaucracy. I also saw some men unloading crates of mangoes out the back of a car and for a mad second thought that this was the vaccine.

Eventually at 3 pm we all shuffled inside through the bleak affair that is the Giza Governmental Complex into a courtyard (think prison more than palace) bordered by the dust-strewn carcasses of dead vehicles of varying descriptions. The vaccination office itself is on the ground floor, and in ordinary times administers vaccines for yellow fever, the winter flu, etc. 

We were met by a harried-looking man who seemed genuinely offended that a load of citizens (8) had descended on his office on a public holiday. True, how dare we. He bad-temperedly declared that the clinic was devoid of paper, pens, forms, doctors, nurses and any and all other accoutrements necessary for fighting Covid, presumably in an attempt to make us collectively bugger off. We just stood there like annoying zombies. 

An enterprising young man, who really should be running a small to medium-sized governorate, suggested that we write down people’s names in the order they had arrived. Bad-tempered man reminded him about the absence of paper. And pens. In the end one of the citizens gave an enterprising young man the empty half of his travel details printout while another provided a pen. 

The next two hours were spent bonding with other people at the center. There is a nice sense of camaraderie when citizens are forced to experience Egyptian bureaucracy. Things can be quite jolly. Two women went off and bought water for everyone in a retro 2011 move. There was a sort of war spirit, the type of atmosphere you’d feel if you were shipwrecked at sea, but quite close to shore and not for very long. 

Things were interrupted by a young man screaming at a civil servant about how he has the right to have the vaccine despite not having received an SMS invite because someone told him that that is the case. Or something along these lines. 

There seems to be conflicting information about this. When I got jabbed no one actually asked to see my SMS. But when I went back two days later to pick up my vaccination certificate, people were asked to show the SMS and anyone without one was told to come back “later in the afternoon” — which effectively meant that they would not be vaccinated because of the hundreds of people in front of them in the queue. However, on Facebook I saw a comment from a woman who said that she went to the Cairo International Convention Center with her passport and got Johnson and Johnson smoothly and easily and did not seem to have even registered.

So it’s all a bit unclear and inconsistent which let’s be honest is on brand.

Some two hours after we arrived I was ushered into the clinic which, quite startlingly, was decorated in leopard print wallpaper. Even more startling was the fact that none of the employees were wearing masks. The nurse wordlessly procured a vial of J&J out of a small Coleman icebox and then rammed the needle into my arm like she was hammering a nail in a reluctant wall. Then I paid the bad-tempered man and it was done.

I picked up my certificate complete with a QR code on Saturday. Crowds were huge this time, and the efficient young man had been replaced by a curmudgeon man who all but spat at the hoards (I said HOARDS) in front of him clamoring for entry. A man demanded to be given priority on the basis of being “the son of the head of the electricity authority.” He was ignored. A woman told me that she had been there all day Friday, and was about to go in when they closed the clinic. She was remarkably sanguine about this.

I left feeling both really grateful that I had got the vaccine, and can therefore safely reopen my business, and triumphant that I had survived Egyptian bureaucracy once again in one piece. 

At the time of writing this only about 2.1 percent of the population have been fully vaccinated in Egypt. I expect that — as in other countries — this extremely low number is in part due to concerns about the effects of the vaccine amongst some people. However the disorganization and difficulty of obtaining information about the vaccine process is a real barrier. I have heard multiple accounts of chaotic, crowded vaccine centers where people have to wait hours to get vaccinated and delayed second doses of AstraZeneca. If I had any reservations about getting vaccinated, the friction of the process would have killed any motivation to do so. I hope that Egypt will eventually obtain sufficient numbers of doses that it can open walk-in centers as exist elsewhere in the world, and that importantly, vaccines remain available for free.