Vaccine selfies are going to be everywhere in 2021.
Vaccine selfies are necessary morale-boosters. An added bonus of the vaccine selfies are going around social media, it provides a glimmer of hope and sense of solidarity for medical workers who are almost universally burned out right now.
Jahan Fahimi, director of the emergency department at UCSF posted a picture of himself receiving the vaccine, as have countless other health-care workers, making the vaccine selfie (or “vaxxies,” as I’m sorry to report I’ve seen them called) a fast-growing trend. While the long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine is, for now, available only to frontline health-care professionals and residents of long-term care facilities, eventually it will be available to us all, and if #medtwitter is any indication, we’re all going to want to take hot pictures of ourselves getting it.
“There’s more value in building public confidence in the vaccine than there is harm in making people feel left out,” adds Fahimi. “We’re all just so exhausted by this year, and this is a nice bookend to give folks a sense of optimism for the upcoming year.”
Mark A. Lewis, the director of gastrointestinal oncology at Intermountain Healthcare explains that while he joked about pumping iron prior to his vaccination, he didn’t do any preparatory weight lifting beyond what he does already. “Lifting has been part of my routine,” he says. “My son, who is 9, likes to mock me for having a dad bod.” Lewis says friends of his joked that a photo they saw of an “absolutely jacked” nurse getting the vaccine was what he had to live up to. Unfortunately, the nurse who administered Lewis’s vaccine specifically told him not to flex during his injection. “They inject into the deltoid, and it actually helps the penetration if you’re not flexing your arm,” he explained a tad wistfully.
As with anything any discernible group of people is openly enjoying, there is already a bit of a backlash to the vaccine selfie: Conservatives have called them “virtue signalling,” while others have called them boastful. “I can understand how it might seem like gloating, but I think it’s important to show we think it’s safe,” says Lewis. Fahimi, too, is empathetic to the critics. “There are a lot of people who really want the vaccine, and I know healthcare workers who are in high risk areas but their hospitals didn’t have really early access,” he says. Nevertheless, he says, the perceived value in posting is too high not to.