The Massachusetts Medievalist on vaccines: take or get?
The Massachusetts Medievalist is appropriately at the back of the line for coronavirus vaccines, but towards the front for thinking about the language we're using in discussing the vaccines.
Among other things, I was struck by then-candidate Kamala Harris's verb choice in the 7 Oct debate exchange with Mike Pence about the vaccine. She said: “If public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it, absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it.”
Other high-profile people also are using "take" when referring to the COVID vaccine. My rep in Congress, the wonderful Katherine Clark, tweeted "I ask you to please take a vaccine as soon as you can." Quoted as one of the first front-line health care workers to be vaccinated, Dr. Valerie Briones-Pryor referred to "the vaccine I took today."
For me, however, the phrase "take a vaccine" didn't pass the SWANS test -- Sounds Wrong to A Native Speaker. To "take a vaccine" was in the same pile as "look at TV" or "knot your shoes" - phrases that are comprehensible in but not part of daily discourse in USA standard English. I had always presumed that people get vaccines while they take medication. A little linguistic digging proved me somewhat right: Google NGram confirmed the existence of "take the/a vaccine" as far back as the 1950s, but the phrase "get the/a vaccine" was used much more frequently (note that the uptick in usage in 1995 corresponds with the licensing of the chicken pox vaccine in that year):
New York Times usages in the past 12 months confirmed the dominance of get over take as the preferred transitive verb with vaccine as direct object; just in the last 30 days, "get the vaccine" occurred 160 times in the nation's paper of record and "take the vaccine" 68 times.
Language is always changing, of course, and "take the vaccine" may soon supersede "get the vaccine" in our daily discourse as we embark on the most urgent vaccination campaign in our nation's history. I suspect that take implies that we, the patients, the citizens, are making an active choice: take requires our agency, activity, and participation. Get, on the other hand, implies passivity and inertia; with get, the vaccine is something that happens to or is imposed on us. With the lack of control and lack of activity we've all endured in the past nine months, some phrasing that claims some active control over our lives, even just a little bit, is a welcome addition.
All good wishes for the new year that awaits -- please get or take the vaccine as soon as you can! The Massachusetts Medievalist will return in 2021 with more musings on medieval studies, higher ed, and Massachusetts art and culture.