27 February 2021 — 1739 mst

What happened & takeaways

JABBED, Part II: Flathead Memo’s editor and janitor
gets his second dose of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine

Thursday, at the Flathead County Health Department’s vaccination clinic at the county’s fairgrounds, I received my second dose of Pfizer’s 95 percent effective Covid-19 vaccine. Aside from a mildly sore right deltoid, I didn’t initially experience any of the memorable unpleasantness the vaccine’s second dose provokes in approximately one-third of its recipients. Now I’m feeling it, but it’s still a mild reaction, far preferable to getting hugged by Mr. Covid.

First, what happened. Then, takeaways, not all favorable to FCHD and a note on the adverse effects scarcity can provoke

Flathead Memo’s ancient blogger sitting in the monitored for shock seats following his second shot. He clocked his 15-minute observation period with his iPhone instead of the mechanical kitchen timer the monitor offered. This selfie should give the unvaccinated hope that help is on the way, but there always are contrarians who miss that message.

What happened

I arrived on time and was out in a half hour. As before receiving my first shot, I was condemned to filling out a paper form with print far too small for comfortable reading with aging eyes. I expressed my exasperation, completed the form, photographed it, and was led like a lamb to the data entry and card stamping station.

There, a clerk entered my form’s data into the database, filled in the second shot part of my CDC designed vaccination card, rubber stamped it with something official, and held up a huge sign reading something equivalent to “sheepherder.”

The herder quickly shepherded me to the injection station, where, before sticking me, the nurse warned there could be a deeply unpleasant reaction to this dose: chills, fevers, sweats, shakes, an arm so sore I might beg for morphine, almost a near death experience. She laid it on so thick, and with such enthusiasm, I’m convinced she was gaslighting me, trying to incite a “Well, that wasn’t so bad after all” reaction that I would convey to friends and family. Sneaky, that approach, and just possibly effective. I hardly felt the injection.

Doubled dosed and almost done, I camped in the observation pews where visibly bored study hall monitors watched to see whether I would collapse from shock. I wondered whether they would be disappointed when I didn't. After 15 uneventful minutes I escaped into a lazy squall of large snowflakes fluttering down prettily to melt on the ground. Just like spring, and there was a new spring in my step.

Takeaways

These were the best run, and the best run by a country mile, FCHD vaccination clinics I’ve ever attended. No confusion. Calm, polite staff and volunteers who moved with alacrity and did not patronize the patients, who themselves were good natured.

What I’ve learned from FCHD’s clinics and other experiences:

• Signing up online for a vaccination appointment is the best approach. FCHD’s online sign-up features an priority determination screen and a form. I think it’s best to sign up in the morning. My elderly friends and family, here and in other states, all found appointments online, sometimes after hours of searching. At February’s beginning, FCHD’s phone system couldn’t handle the vaccination appointment traffic; I hope that has changed. And now there are additional online options. This one connects you with the pharmacies at local Albertsons and Safeways. Tips on navigating vaccination sign-up sites are online at the Washington Post.


• Updated. FCHD has a satellite vaccination clinic in Whitefish, and may put one in Columbia Falls. The department knows how to keep the vaccines cold, the Pfizer vaccine now can be stored at higher temperatures, and the one-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine, less effective but not requiring radical cold storage, will be available soon. Yet a medical facility just 880 crow meters from Kalispell’s hospital told its on life support patients they would not be vaccinated onsite because the cold storage requirements created insurmountable difficulties. Given the current state of cyrostorage technology, it seems likely the overriding reason they were told to “get thee vaccinated by thyself” was a liability concern.


• Health care workers know how to operate ultra cold storage systems. There’s no reason they should not have. Cyrostorage is a mature technology. Insulated containers and coolants such as liquid nitrogen (boiling point, -196°F) and dry ice (frozen CO2, sublimnation point -109°F) are widely available. Covid-19 vaccines are shipped in containers cooled with dry ice. People operating vaccination clinics don’t like the complexity of low temperature storage, but they’re smart people who can and do adapt. So if sometime tells you cold temperature storage requirements prevent vaccinators from walking ten minutes from a hospital with a superfreezer to a nursing with an Igloo cooler crammed with dry ice and vaccine, the proper response is “Bullshit!,” delivered with withering acerbity.


• Older people with ailments still living at home, especially those with lower levels of education, may need help scheduling vaccination appointments via the internet.


• If age has weakened your eyes, bring strong reading eyeglasses, or a magnifying glass, to ease the strain reading the FCHD form’s infuriatingly small print puts on your orbs.


• You have a right to a copy of that form. But the only way you'll get a copy is by photographing the form with your smartphone.


• Read the fine print. Your name and vaccination details will be entered into a statewide vaccination registry, just like firearms should be entered into a statewide firearms registry. If you find that unacceptably fetters your liberty, you're not compelled to be vaccinated (but you should be). You can always take your chances with Mr. Covid.


• Don’t let your guard down. Don’t be the last person to die before the pandemic ends. Continue wearing your mask, keep your distance, and wash your hands that by now are like mine, chapped, bleeding, and sore. The promised land is in sight, but it’s still a long, long, way down the road.

Vaccine scarcity brings out the worst in people

Sudden disasters such as earthquakes, munitions ships exploding at the wharf, terrorest attacks killing thousands, often bring out the best in people, a phenomenon Rebecca Solnit examines in A Paradise Built in Hell. When the earth stopped shaking in San Francisco, the survivors, overjoyed to alive, helped each other.

But slow moving disasters such as the murderous 1930s Ukrainian famine that Anne Applebaum describes in chilling eloquence in Red Famine, bring out humankinds worst. As food became increasingly scarce, the starving turned on each other, stealing food, killing to get food, even committing cannibalism.

The Covid-19 pandemic is part sudden disaster, part slow moving disaster. It’s brought out the best in some, the worst in others. The longer it lasts, the more, it seems to me, the worst are brought out.

Every vaccination campaign during a pandemic begins on an emergency basis with a scarcity of the vaccine. Today, in the fifth week of the Biden administration, demand for Covid-19 vaccines greatly exceeds the supply, which is increasing; but shortages will exist for months. It’s not a matter of money; the manufacturers are awash in greenbacks. It’s a matter of production capacity. Consequently, we’re giving priority to the people most at risk of dying if infected.

That’s rationing, and rationing always generates inequities.

Each state sets its own priority based on its own needs and the recommendations of the Centers for Disease control. Those priorities differ. And they change when elections deliver the control of a state to new officials and different political parties. In Montana, newly elected Republican Governor Greg Gianforte tweaked the priorities set by former Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat.

Rationing generates competition among groups, many, such as first responders and schoolteachers, who can make strong, or at least plausible, cases why they should have a higher priority than other groups. It leads to black markets where wealthy crooks bribe priority setters and vaccine custodians to jump the queue. It leads to ugly disputes and lasting hurts.

When vaccines become plentiful, when the vaccine delivery system expands and matures, scarcity’s evils will disappear. But, I hope, it’s lessons are not forgotten.