According to Madhat Khattar, Ph.D., who took the first dose of the COVID vaccine in March, but won’t get a second dose, enlisting children to protect adults in what is effectively an ongoing clinical trial is simply unfathomable. am a microbiologist and a scientist. I am a microbiologist because that is what I specialized in at university, and what I have worked in since, in academia. I am a scientist because I place a higher value on asking questions than on consumption of knowledge. Never previously have I felt hesitant about vaccines. Yet I took my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine last March with some hesitation, and have since decided not to take the second dose. Something struck me as problematic very early on in the COVID-19 narrative when the director-general of the World Health Organization announced that the coronavirus in question was ‘public enemy number one’, an ‘unprecedented threat’ and an ‘enemy against humanity.’ I knew that something was not right, for this was the kind of terminology that had been used at the end of the Second World War, not to describe an infectious agent, but to refer to nuclear weapons and the banality of evil. I complied with the first UK-wide lockdown in March 2020 with an unresolved mixture of disbelief and concern, laced with an unavoidable shot of fear — even though, rationally, I did not believe that the air all around us was full of a new plague. I even volunteered for vaccine trials. This was the UK shutting everything down, and everyone in. As it turned out, science was the casualty of a toxic narrative of extreme urgency and fear, a narrative swiftly adopted by most governments and their advisors the world over.