Halloween occurs once a year, and with it comes a tempting opportunity to address current events. Should you dress up as sexy (cozy) Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Holmes? The boat that got stuck in the Suez Canal?
Or this year, maybe you think it would be fun to dress up as a vaccine? I’d personally rather gorge myself on mini-Snickers in peace than be reminded yet again that we’re still in the throes of what is now a potentially solvable pandemic — if only people would get immunized — but to each their own.
It began, as all Halloween misfortunes do, with a sexy costume, which includes a needle headpiece that certainly won’t make people any less scared of the vaccine. Before long, Katy Perry, who has a well-chronicled history of chaotic costumes, joined in. She appears to have commissioned a giant syringe-shaped sheath emblazoned with her name. Her partner, Orlando Bloom, dressed up as a doctor with a “Dr. Dilf” nametag to coordinate and posted a photo of the two of them with the truly haunting caption, “I vaxed a girl and I liked it.” Logistically, I’m having trouble doing the math on this one, since Katy Perry is the vax, so how could he also vax her? But at least this revamped lyric is less problematic than the original.
Then there’s figure skater Adam Rippon, who took a different approach to the subject matter and assembled a wildly elaborate homage to Nicki Minaj’s series of vaccine-skeptical tweets from earlier this year. You know, the ones that forced multiple world leaders to clarify that there was no validity to her claims about her cousin’s friend’s balls? Rippon donned a “Beam Me Up, Scotty” shirt, bloody arm bandage, and some strategically placed balloons to honor these misinformed missives, in addition to drawing a parody vaccine card for his “Modernatron” immunization.
Vaccine costumes are, of course, the only logical successors to vaccine selfies. It remains to be seen whether these costumes will spook anyone into getting the shot, but here’s hoping, I guess?