By Al S. Mendoza 

 

A jab usually happens in boxing.

It is delivered by the left hand if you are an orthodox.  Orthodox, meaning you are a right-hander.

In boxing, the jab is the lightest of all punches.

That’s why it usually cannot hurt the one absorbing it.

It is but a glance.  Like a fly grazing your face.

It can’t cause serious damage.

Only volumes of jabs can.

As in landing your bunches of jabs in rushes, or even in staccato style, against a cut above the eye or on a wounded, bloodied cheek.

The late Muhammad Ali was boxing’s best jabber of all time.

The minute Ali opens a cut on his foe’s face, he’d not stop pummeling that wound, usually transforming his enemy’s entire facial frame into blood and gore.

Ali’s lightning-quick jabs were the normal Waterloos of his hapless victims, especially the flat-footed and those a bit slow to telegraph a punch.

But allow me to digress.

The jab I would wish to discuss more today than anything is not aimed at the face but at the arm.

Not a harmless one but don’t get fooled.

The jab I got—yes, it was me who took the blow—was, you guessed it right, not a jolter but, well, a killer.

Did I not say don’t get fooled?

It was a jab, indeed, and while it felt practically painless—I thought it’d even make me cringe or, worse, scream—it had the effect, in my mind, of a killer.

In other words, this was one jab that could knock the foe dead—God willing.

I refer to the Sinovac vaccine.

Yes, I got vaccinated on April 13 at the Commonwealth Elementary School along Commonwealth Avenue, Quezon City.

I got the jab without having to register online through the QC’s electronic system.

I tried that but, alas, no luck.

So, I walked in.  And, to my pleasant surprise, the school staff—if there were also QC employees helping man the vaccination area, bless them—were superbly courteous, polite and very professional in dispensing their duties.

While they got their job well done, I had my jab hitch-free man, oh, man.

From the series of filling-up-the-forms/interviews on the first four desks, queued up while we were distantly seated on mono-blocs, to the blood-pressure-taking level, all the way to the vaccination hall as the final destination, it was smooth sailing all the way.

The amazing thing was I was not only with my wife but with our grandson as well.

Our dear Mayo qualified—thank God—as a comorbidity since he contracted the Kawasaki Disease as a toddler.

We arrived at 8:29 a.m. and, by 9:39 a.m., it was over.

That calculatingly fast.

A clockwork precision a la Swiss watch.

Who said government is not capable of doing honest-to-goodness work?

The jab won’t totally trump the virus but the thought of it as a virus-deflector is enough to make all three of us feel good.

Also, science says to be vaccinated is the best defense against the pandemic now into its second year of bedeviling mankind.

Better to have protection—the jab—than nothing at all.

And so, go, get the jab now.  And stop the virus from knocking you down, if not out!

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