Day 351…
I now have a vaccine appointment for this Saturday instead of the one I had at the end of next month.
Yesterday afternoon, I was this close to getting one right away, but as I was filing out the website form, somebody else grabbed it.
Then somebody else texted me that a pharmacy in our neighborhood had a supply but when I called them, I was told that regardless of what the state directives in regard to underlying conditions, that they weren’t giving it out to anyone under 65.
Another site that somebody else told me about, after a flurry of activity, decided to limit who they would administer it to, based on their zip codes - keeping their supply for people nearby. I was just one zip code too far away.
A friend of a friend is who ultimately found me the one I got. She is a stay-at-home mom who started taking referrals from her friends. She keeps various sites open and keeps refreshing until appointments become available. She doesn’t charge anything for the service but will accept tips.
There has to be a better way.
I’m not complaining myself because I have the time, resources and contacts to figure out how to play this absurd game and achieve the end result. What happens to the people who don’t? What happens to the elderly people who may not have access to the internet or the facility to navigate through it. What happens to the people who may be vaccination hesitant in the first place who, when confronted with this byzantine structure surrounding the rollout, simply give up.
I fully support local pharmacies keeping their supplies for their own local customers. I only hope that they are doing the work of reaching out to their customers - especially those at risk - rather than expecting them to just come in. The place I am meant to get the vaccine is a state-run program that has taken over a closed high school’s gymnasium. I am borrowing a neighbor’s car to get there.
The vaccine rollout started without any real guidance at all. What’s being attempted now is a kind of retroactive re-jiggering of a deeply flawed system already in place. People, like the woman who helped Michael and I, are stepping into fill the void.
MSNBC interviewed a 14-year-old kid in Chicago who has already helped hundreds of seniors find appointments. As he was helping his grandparents in Florida get one, he realized how impossible it was for most people.
He started helping others and now has a large group of volunteers who have joined with him. They all keep multiple computer screens open and keep refreshing them until appointments crop up and then they swoop in and grab as many of them as they can.
As great as that is, what it really means is that soon nobody is going to be able to get an appointment without enlisting one of these middlemen. Individuals cannot begin to compete with an organized system like that.
It’s like trying to get tickets to a Beyoncé concert. You can’t just buy them. They’re gone within minutes of being put on sale with most of them seemingly going to ticket agencies who then resell them at a substantial mark-up.
Die-hard fans wait on their computers for the exact time of the release and then refresh like mad until they find them. After the first ten minutes of the sale, If you can find them at all, it’s usually through a third party.
I am not interested in navigating through all of that, so I don’t ever even try. I don’t want to go that badly. When I do go to a concert it’s usually because somebody else has gotten the tickets and asked me along.
I did get to see Beyoncé in Las Vegas a few years ago when I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. A small group of tickets that had been held back were suddenly released and I happened to be at the box office getting tickets for something else when it happened.
The person behind the counter who was helping me looked startled and suddenly said, “Oh wow. Beyoncé tickets.” I asked if I could get one. Much to my surprise the answer was yes, and I got in. The tickets had been reserved for the press, so it was a great seat, too.
Now, I wasn’t looking for a Beyoncé ticket. I knew she was playing and when I saw the billboard, I thought, “that would be nice,” and never gave it another thought. I was at the box office because I was looking for a ticket to KA, the Cirque de Soleil show, and didn’t want to pay the online service fee. If I really was desperate to see Beyoncé, that never would have happened.
It was just luck.
It was a fantastic concert, of course. She is an incredible performer and the energy in that arena was unbelievable. I actually left, though, being somewhat angry that events like that are so hard to get into.
The stress of looking for something that we all need really shouldn’t be this high. Luck shouldn’t be a factor. New York state should have figured out a way to tell us when we could get the shot rather than us doing it ourselves. Let everyone register and fill out a form with all the pertinent information and then, when we became eligible, call us in.
At the moment, the “vaccine helpers” seem to be doing it mostly out of the goodness of their hearts, but it is going to monetize very quickly. The person who helped us didn’t mention anything about payment or a tip at all until we called back and asked. If we hadn’t offered, we wouldn’t have had to pay them anything. I don’t think that’s going to be the case for very much longer.
The government should have anticipated all of this and figured out how to avoid it.
Someone from the Whitney Museum just called me and said that Michael’s and my membership renewal was coming due. We have it on auto-renewal, but our credit card must have changed so it wasn’t working. The person who called offered to take my new card information down on the phone.
I told them that I would prefer to do it online because while I was sure that they were legit, there was no way for me to tell for sure. They seemed fine with that but then offered to send me a link. I asked them that given that I didn’t trust them to necessarily be who they said they were, why would I trust their link?
They seemed to be real, but there was absolutely no way to tell. I’d like to think that I am aware enough that I wouldn’t fall for a scam like that if it was, indeed, a scam, but who knows?
Who knows, these days, where my online information really is. It is completely possible that one of the vaccine sites I registered with could do something untoward with the information I gave them.
The more time you spend online the more that you realize how vigilant you really need to be. I’m under no illusions about how vulnerable we really are. While it seems like a ridiculous paranoid fantasy, our computers are actually listening to what we say.
We know that the Russians were able to hack into a large number of our country’s online infrastructures. Hacks into local systems and smaller individual sites are far more common than they should be. Every time we sign up on a new site, we leave ourselves just that much more vulnerable.
Our ex-President did not appear to do much of anything to protect us from any of this. He did not call upon experts to create a well thought out rollout strategy for the vaccine. Instead, he passed that responsibility down to the individual states without then giving them the resources both intellectual and financial to have a prayer of creating one either.
His repeated downplaying of the seriousness of the pandemic has left us with an enormous percentage of our population who don’t believe that they need the vaccine because the virus isn’t real.
Then, he did nothing at all to combat the hacking by the Russians. Not only does that leave us vulnerable, but it plants the seeds of doubt that even our governmental websites might not be fully safe to use.
Eventually, people who want the vaccine will be able to get it. There are probably going to be instances where if you can’t prove that you’ve been vaccinated that you aren’t going to be allowed to participate in whatever it is - be it a job or some kind of travel. There are going to be countries that will not let outsiders in who cannot prove that they’ve been inoculated.
It makes sense that when Broadway starts up again that the casts and crews of shows may need to show proof of vaccination before we can all interact together. We will need to be together in close quarters every day, whereas the audience will only gather together for one performance. The protocols will, by necessity, be very different depending on which side of the footlights you are on.
Hopefully, sooner rather than later, the people in our industry will start to be considered essential workers. We are a vital part of the economy and it is not going to fully improve until we are back up and running.
If we are all vaccinated and can work together, then the audience can be dealt with separately. At the moment, most of the effort seems to be going towards making the audience safe - they need to start with us.
For that reason, I am happy that Michael and I have been able to schedule our appointments sooner rather than later. When work does start to happen again, the fewer obstacles in our way, the better.
That said, there is no real need for an immediate rush towards being inoculated. I’m only getting mine because of an underlying condition. It’s going to be a while before the people I usually interact with will be able to get theirs.
The overwhelming majority of the people in my industry are younger and healthier and, as a result, are much further down the list. Unless they start to be considered as essential workers, they might be many months away from being able to get it.
I can’t really get back to work before they can so all the vaccine will really give me at this point is a little more peace of mind in my daily life. For the moment, that will have to be enough.
Almost every inside way to sign up for the vaccine that I have been privy to in recent days has been closed down. Unfortunately, therefore, I’m not all that much help as a resource. As word gets out, they all became overrun and started having to add restrictions.
As more and more of the vaccines are made available, though, the easier that it will get to find one. It seems likely that the Johnson & Johnson one will be approved soon which will just add more to the marketplace.
In the meantime, if you are eligible, keep refreshing those websites and if you have friends who are searching, keep your ear to the ground and pass along whatever new intel that might come your way. It might just be as simple as noticing that somewhere in your neighborhood is distributing them.
The government is finally trying, but they are never going to be able to take care of us as well as we can take care of each other.
So let’s do that.
Wear a mask, keep your distance and get vaccinated when you can.
I got help thru a volunteer from my synagogue. And they just trained a whole lot more volunteers- no charge and will help anyone- doing outreach to other organizations in the community. This is the site they’re using - https://nycvaccinelist.com/
which I just got access to. I’ve referred a few friends and they got appts. within a day or two.
💕Loved your last lines” the government is never going to be able to take care of us as well as we can take care of each other” my lesson of this past year.. now & forever. they too are people, never experienced covid before are learning new things every day... to thine own self be true .... wear a mask, socially distance, wash your hands and keep your eyes on your dreams & passion and obey only love 💕