Coronavax experiences?

[Leo Enticknap]

Now, a day after shot #1, I got the email to register for shot #2...

Interesting. There appear to be differences in the way the logistics of the vaccine rollout are being organized at state and county level. In my case, accepting the appointment for shot #1 set the appointment for shot #2 in stone: same place, same time, three weeks later. You click to accept both at once, undertaking to show up for shot #2 as well. This makes sense to me: it increases the likelihood of you following through and actually getting both shots, because there is nothing proactive that you have to do (go on a website and make a second appointment) after shot #1, apart from showing up for shot #2 when you're told.

That having been said, those like us who actually want to be vaxxed and signed up almost as soon as we became eligible are not going to be the problem cases (from the government's perspective). I've heard reports of some opinion polls suggesting that the proportion of the population who range between reluctant and outright opposed is high enough to endanger us reaching herd immunity. Projections based on them suggest that wiithin 1-2 months, everyone who is eligible and willing will have been vaxxed, and that those who remain will represent a tougher nut to crack.

[Steve Guttag]

Yeah...I think it would have been wiser to just set it up all at once too. But I literally registered for something like 10 different "systems" at once. How Anne Arundel handled it could, and likely was, different than how other entities that could administer the vaccine(s). My time for receiving shot #2 is about 1/2 hour later than shot #1...I guess I wasn't as fast clicking on the link as others!

[Marcel Birgelen]

That having been said, those like us who actually want to be vaxxed and signed up almost as soon as we became eligible are not going to be the problem cases (from the government's perspective). I've heard reports of some opinion polls suggesting that the proportion of the population who range between reluctant and outright opposed is high enough to endanger us reaching herd immunity. Projections based on them suggest that wiithin 1-2 months, everyone who is eligible and willing will have been vaxxed, and that those who remain will represent a tougher nut to crack.

If they would open-up a waiting list for AstraZeneca, that would ensure me quicker access to a vaccine than via the "standby waiting line", then I'd happily signup for it. The only way to get this whole thing back to something resembling normal is when we've reached herd immunity and the faster we're getting there, the lesser the evil will be...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Just saw on the news tonight that Pfizer will be doing a yearly booster shot for those that have had their vaccination.

[Steve Guttag]

It's possible. What Pfizer said was it is likely that a booster would be needed/advisable 6-12 months after vaccination but data continues to come in and variants can play a role in it all as well as how the whole vaccination goes for herd immunity. Remember, this is an EMERGENCY vaccine and as J&J as well as AZ is going through, there are discoveries as they go. Nobody knows how, exactly this will all play out, in the end.

[Bobby Henderson]

I think the significant amount of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine hesitancy and outright refusal among America's population is one factor why Pfizer's CEO said people would probably need annual booster shots. I'm not surprised.

Personally, I signed up for the vaccine through Oklahoma's state department of health website. I presumed I would get an appointment to show up to a mass vaccination "pod" at the mall or some other public place. And I presumed I might be waiting well into May before being able to get vaccinated. It sure didn't work out that way. I ended up being able to get vaccinated at a local Walgreens, earlier than expected, walk-in style with no appointment all due to a LOT of "eligible" people not bothering to get vaccinated when having the opportunity to do so.

Nationwide, vaccinations for SARS-CoV-2 look like they're about to hit a wall. Soon people administering vaccines will run out of people willing to get the shots. In politically "red" states (like here in Oklahoma) it's EASY to get vaccinated without any wait time. Here it's still that way even with vaccine eligibility opened to all adults and even people from out of state. In coastal states and the Northeast more people want to be vaccinated so there is more of a wait time. But even those states will end up with between 20%-40% of the population not bothering or flat out refusing the vaccine.

This gets back to the not so good news from Pfizer's CEO. He knows about the scenario of vaccine refusal among America's population. There is quite a lot of it in Europe. Compound that with the fact many less-rich nations have far less access to the vaccines. For instance it may be 2 or more years before everyone in Africa has a chance to be vaccinated. Unvaccinated people are FUEL for SARS-CoV-2 to continue evolving, mutating and generating new variants. Given enough of a chance a deadly virus will spawn new strains that get around existing vaccines and bypass natural immunity gained from previous infection.

In short, the fuckwits who are refusing to get vaccinated when given the opportunity are giving this virus the chance to drop us all back at square one. We're basically blowing any chance of permanently eradicating this virus. Hence the likelihood we'll all need booster shots at regular intervals. Of course a bunch of people won't bother. So COVID-19 will be able to continue killing a hell of a lot of people. Although it's going to be a little more difficult in the future to have sympathy for someone who dies of COVID-19 when he had every opportunity to get vaccinated.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's possible. What Pfizer said was it is likely that a booster would be needed/advisable 6-12 months after vaccination but data continues to come in and variants can play a role in it all as well as how the whole vaccination goes for herd immunity. Remember, this is an EMERGENCY vaccine and as J&J as well as AZ is going through, there are discoveries as they go. Nobody knows how, exactly this will all play out, in the end.

I'm all for vaccinating the world's population at the highest speed possible... But still I can understand why a lot of people are hesitant for getting a vaccine that has only been vetted for emergency use. It's hard to convince people that taking the calculated risk now, is most likely much better than doing nothing. But imagine the amount of finger-pointing and possible other fall-outs of what would happen if, let's say 10 or 15 years down the road, we discover one or more of those vaccines do have serious long-term consequences. It's not like it never happened before, not necessarily with vaccines, but with medical substances in general and both politics and the pharmaceutical industry have tried to play it down every single time.

With the Internet being the big conspiracy theory machine that it is today, I expect stories to emerge from mind-controlling microchips to whatnot kind of zombie-symptoms for years to come from this alone. While this all only used to be a marginal fringe, this QAnon thing has shown us, how even the most wacky and borderline crazy conspiracy theories now can reach and "infect" a large part of the population. Since we haven't found a vaccine against stupidity yet, if we're not careful, those "digital pandemics" could become equally worse or even worse than the real pandemics out there...

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm all for vaccinating the world's population at the highest speed possible... But still I can understand why a lot of people are hesitant for getting a vaccine that has only been vetted for emergency use.

The reasons for the hesitancy are clear, but I dimiss much of it as willful stupidity and ignorance. Time equals lives. Here in the United States we farted around thru all of 2020 not thinking at all about the logistics of distributing vaccines and getting shots into arms. At least 100,000 or more Americans would still be alive today if not for those failures going into 2021. We're in a race against time with a virus bent on evolving. The virus is not taking a time-out to let vaccine skeptics make up their minds. Really, they've made up their minds, but are grasping at straws trying to find new reasons to justify refusing the vaccine.

The only camp I can give any slack for being suspicious of the vaccine is African Americans. That's thanks to the standard of sub-standard medical care that part of our population receives and the history of sinister, harmful medical treatments and experiments perpetrated against them. Tuskeegee Experiment anyone? But that's out-weighed by the fact COVID-19 is killing minorities at higher per capita rates. The prevalance of diabetes, high blood pressure and other co-morbidities puts many Black Americans at greater risk of dangerous outcomes via SARS-CoV-2 infection.

I have zero understanding for the big chunk of America's population refusing COVID-19 vaccination due to their political party allegiance. That's much of Joke-lahoma for you.

Most of my relatives, close friends and colleagues have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19. So I'm personally at the point of not giving a tinker's damn about the vaccine hold-outs. Go ahead, don't get vaccinated, see how that works out for you. It's unlikely we're ever going to reach herd immunity in the United States and it looks impossible to accomplish globally. A local doctor spoke to our civic club at a meeting a few weeks ago; he put it simply, "you're either going to get the vaccine or you're going to get covid." It's a matter of time. With a big chunk of the population unvaccinated and new variants that are more contagious floating around infection of the unvaccinated over the long haul looks guaranteed.

In the future the preventable deaths of Americans from COVID-19 are really not going to be all that tragic. Certainly not anymore so than an IV drug user dying from a heroin overdose. Maybe even less tragic than that, considering a drug addict doesn't have as much free will as a person refusing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Basically future American deaths from COVID-19 are going to be "Darwin Awards Winners."

[Leo Enticknap]

You've got to take the human nature factor into account in all of this. There are some valid, underlying reasons for skepticism. If there weren't, no-one would ever have taken any notice of Wakefield. But a lot of people did, and still do. He understood propaganda 101: never try to put a new idea into someone's head that they might resist. Instead, take an existing one, amplify it, and/or distort it. That works. It has to be acknowledged that there are small number of vaccine recipients who do have a bad reaction, and in an even smaller number of cases, a reaction so bad that it causes permanent injury or death. Of course, if that's a significantly smaller number than would have finished up in the same place from the disease itself, vaccination is worth doing. But vaccine proponents don't do themselves any favors when they deny the existence of such cases, or smear those who draw attention to them as extremists and/or conspiracy theorists. That simply creates the suspicion that there is something to hide, which is the jumping off point for the anti-vaxxer tendency to claim that vaccines are a deadly threat.

My gut feeling is that there is a significant proportion of the population, who, after, say, 100 million have been vaccinated and only a handful of those had anything seriously bad happen to them as a result, their reluctance will wane and they'll get the shot. But, at the risk of getting into forbidden territory, bad decisions by political and business leaders could impede that process. If the federal government had outlawed "vaccine passports" (i.e. requiring proof of vaccination for travel within the country, and/or entry to businesses and events that admit members of the public) at the get go (apart from for entrants to the country from overseas), rather than let it become a red v. blue issue, which is what has now happened, then, paradoxically, I think it would have helped the vaccine rollout. Allowing that requirement to become established will let the anti-vaxxers claim, with prima facie credibility, that the vaccine is being forced on you involuntarily, because it's so dangerous that no-one in their right mind would have it voluntarily.

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm not sure what else scientists and policy makers can do to effectively "sell" people on getting vaccinated. For every reason to be skeptical there is an answer to offset that concern. In terms of math and odds, the health risks from the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are far lower than the health risks of COVID-19.

What I find particularly annoying (and this one is really common in the US) is people looking at the situation only as it pertains to themselves. Whether the topic is wearing masks in public or getting vaccinated too many Americans utterly fail to realize doing either is as much about protecting other people as it is about protecting themselves. The idea is interrupting the chain of transmission. Big picture stuff. Too many of us Americans are so hopelessly self-absorbed we can't grasp that concept.

[Martin McCaffery]

It's now 24 hours after my second Pfizer shot. Sore arm at injection, and some muscle pain like an overly strenuous workout. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary. Get your shots.
My assistant is getting her first shot today. We're all betting on her to suffer the bad side effects.

[Leo Enticknap]

Get your shots.

And possibly even get shot in the process, the way things are going...

Fight between nurses closes Beaumont coronavirus vaccine clinic

A Riverside County-run coronavirus vaccination clinic in Beaumont is closed for the rest of Friday, April 16, after a fight between two female nurses, county officials said.

The incident, which affected 245 appointments, occurred at the Albert A. Chatigny Senior Community Recreation Center, 1310 Oak Valley Parkway. The clinic is expected to reopen Monday, April 19.

The fight, which was reported about 10:16 a.m., involved a “personal issue between the two nurses,” said Marcedes Cashmer, a Beaumont police spokeswoman.

One nurse, who was taken to the hospital and later released, was cited on suspicion of assault but not jailed, said Cashmer, adding she did not have the nurse’s name.

The other nurse complained of pain, but was not hospitalized, Cashmer said. Witnesses intervened in the altercation, she said.

Shane Reichardt, a county emergency management department spokesman, said via email that staff “was working to resolve” a personnel matter when “it escalated to a physical altercation between two contract nurses and staff intervened.”

“The clinic will remain closed for the remainder of the day …” Reichardt said Friday afternoon.

Both of the nurses who fought were women, said Reichardt, who declined to release their names. No vaccines or equipment was damaged, he said.

“Some of the nurses were working their last day on their contract assignment so it was decided to close the clinic and start with a fresh team on Monday,” Reichardt added.

The Chatigny clinic, which is open weekdays, is one of four fixed-site vaccination clinics run by the county’s public health department.

Last month, the county administered its one millionth vaccine dose at the Beaumont center.

[Frank Cox]

My wife and I got our first shot of Moderna on Monday. It was actually an appointment just for me - she's younger than I am so her appointment was for next week - but there was a cancellation just before we got there so there was an extra dose available and the nurses said that she could have it.

We Canadians have to wait for up to four months for our second dose, though. The nurses there said that we'll get notified to come in again anywhere from four weeks to four months from now.

We both had a sore arm overnight that night, but other than that, there was nothing much to it.

Now all we need is that second dose....

[Frank Cox]

There's a funny story to go along with our vaccine experience.

My appointment was at the Fort Qu'Appelle Senior's Center. Fort Qu'Appelle is a town that's about an hour's drive from here and while I drive past it occasionally I don't think I've ever actually gone into the town itself before.

So I looked up the Fort Qu'Appelle Senior's Center on Google and off we went. Got to the address listed and it's the Bargain Shop (a Canadian chain of dollar stores). Well, this obviously ain't it, so I went into the Bargain Shop to ask where I should go. The woman at the counter saw me standing there looking lost and said, "Are you looking for the Senior's Center?" I said that I was, and she said, "Every second person coming in the door is looking for the Senior's Center. This is how you get there." And she gave me directions.

I got to where I was going, got checked in and the nurse who was setting the stuff up for me said, "You're from Melville?" I said that I was, and she said, "Did you go to the Bargain Shop?"

[Mike Blakesley]

The reasons for the hesitancy are clear, but I dimiss much of it as willful stupidity and ignorance.

Um, I don't think people are willfully stupid.

A local doctor spoke to our civic club at a meeting a few weeks ago; he put it simply, "you're either going to get the vaccine or you're going to get covid." It's a matter of time.

Well, a lot of the hesitant people figure it this way: (1) You're not guaranteed to get it (and if you get it, you might not ever know it; (2) It has a 99+ % survival rate, so if I get it, who cares? and (3) I think I already had it, so I'm immune. The ONLY argument that crushes these three points is the "But you're protecting others" argument, but for them, they refer back to the first three points and figure that death from it is highly unlikely. So it's hard to argue with them. (I've got a few in my family).

My wife and I got the Moderna vaccine in February and March. We had zero problems outside of a slightly sore arm, and even that didn't bother me at all.

What was weird for us was, in February 2020 I got horribly sick with flu-ish symptions right after coming home from a cruise. Later on after Covid became widely known, I figured that I had had it and that explained me not getting sick with it over the summer, despite plenty of exposure to people in my jobs. And my wife didn't get sick either.

So then last fall we went and donated blood, during which they check you for antibodies and..... she had the antibodies, and I didn't.