Hyderabad: It is nearly 450 years that he wrote what the duties of a wife should be. Be it Bianca or Kate, The Taming of the Shrew was something that many have watched with rapt attention all these years, barring nearly a year in the recent past.
The Coronavirus, the lockdown and distancing norms have robbed many normal things out of people’s lives and replaced them with the new normal. But, William Shakespeare seems to remain rock solid till now, punching a hole in the thick smoke of uncertainty on whether the world has an efficacious vaccine to tide over the pandemic or not. Actually, the second individual in Britain to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine outside clinical trial was a man named William Shakespeare!
The 81-year-old Shakespeare was administered with the vaccine after the first shot was given to 90-year-old grandmother Margaret Keenan. Shakespeare, though, is the first man to receive the shot and when last reports came in, he was doing fine.
The United Kingdom has been the first country to approve a Covid-19 vaccine. It was on December 2 that UK regulators granted emergency-use authorisation to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, barely seven months after the clinical trials first started.
READ:Ethiopia rejects independent investigations into Tigray conflict
Okay, this William Shakespeare might not be as literal as the bard because he has a middle name – Bill, but netizens simply erupted with joy and pun as the name and its uncanny semblance came to the fore. In fact, not only the name, but William Bill Shakespeare also shares the poet’s same county, Warwickshire, in England. Barely 20 miles from the poet’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bill received his vaccine shot in a hospital.
The Twitterati had a feast with the namesake with one tweet reading, “I’m surprised they let William Shakespeare have the vaccine. I thought he was Bard.” Social media platforms were flooded with messages like, “They really are prioritising the elderly: this guy is 456” to another simply saying, “All’s well that ends well.”
Pfizer has already applied for approval of emergency use authorisation from the Drugs Controller General of India for their vaccine to be made available and be administered in the country. Along with them, another vaccine, Covisheild, developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca and manufactured by Serum Institute of India, is also waiting for the DCGI nod. Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech is the third vaccine candidate in the pipeline. Other than the efficacy of the vaccines, the storage issue of the vaccines are also been discussed and deliberated upon, threadbare.
So, be it any pharma company developing the vaccine and the research put in to develop and remedy to the deadly virus, for now William Bill Shakespeare can surely claim that he was the first man to directly participate in something, which can be called, ‘The Taming of the Flu’.
READ: Curitiba - The innovative city of Brazil
