UK-based Bicolano hairdresser urges Pinoys to get Covid vax

A former nurse from Naga City and now a hairdresser in the United Kingdom (UK) hopes to encourage fellow Filipinos to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

So he shared his vaccination experience with Vice President Leni Robredo via her weekly radio program “BISErbisyong LENI”.

Grant Gannaban-O’Neill, 42 years old, said we need to encourage everyone to get the vaccine to achieve herd immunity or ‘population immunity’.

According to the World Health Organization, [it] is “the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”

Gannaban-O’Neill, who is legally married to an Englishman for seven years now, also talked about the minor side effects he felt when he got vaccinated. Among them is pangangalay, slight fever, and chills. He said these are normal effects of getting vaccinated, like the anti-flu shots, and should not be a cause for worry.

As a part-time hairdresser in a care home in England, Gannaban-O’Neill was among the first UK residents to receive the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.

According to him, the vaccine does not use the actual virus but will allow our body to recognize the virus once encountered and will trigger an immune response.

Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine (brand name: Comirnaty) is a genetic vaccine, a type of vaccine that according to WHO, “introduces messenger RNA (mRNA) [to instruct] the cell to produce proteins of the S antigen (a piece of the spike protein unique to [COVID-19]) to stimulate an immune response.”

According to immunology.org, there are other types of vaccines developed for Covid-19:

These are: Vector vaccines which are also used for Ebola vaccines; inactivated vaccines, also used for influenza vaccines; attenuated vaccines, also used for oral polio vaccines; and protein vaccines, also used for Hepatitis B vaccine.