I’m going to be honest. I don’t really know how to write an introduction for this. You all know the story by now. H1N1 is going around and it is either a media creation or a harbinger of the apocalypse. So I would like to apologize in advance if I am further flooding the blogosphere with this topic. So I would like to warn you in advance. This is a post about the H1N1 vaccine. If you are tired of the topic please turn elsewhere. I won’t be offended.
Recently the Centre for Disease Control decided to offer the vaccine, which is in limited supply, to the graduating classes and teachers of local and private schools. As a teacher at an international school I was offered the choice to get vaccinated or not. On Wednesday I decided to get the shot for a number of reasons.
As an English teacher at a 6,000-strong middle school in the northwest of Hunan province, I come into contact with several hundred students a day. My course load puts me in front of roughly 850 students a week. In a school as cramped as mine, the students and staff are constantly breathing each other’s germs. As such, when I started to get a deep-lung cough and run a mild fever, I should have known it was only a matter of time before the surgical-mask brigade descended on our school.
