How people get the Covid-19 vaccine by chance

As the patchwork process of delivering Covid-19 vaccines continues across the country, many Americans have found themselves struggling to find a dose for themselves or their loved ones. Amid the chaos, stories emerged of lucky people in situations where vaccines were available. In January, a CVS Client was randomly vaccinated on a trip to buy Hot Pockets. In Oregon, a snowstorm prompted health workers trapped in a traffic jam to vaccinate motorists trapped on a highway.

These stories arouse feelings of hope and envy because, although the pace of distribution has accelerated in recent months – on March 1, there were 22.99 vaccines per 100 people in the United States. – there are still processes and obstacles to getting as many shots as possible.

One of the biggest problems is the particularities of storage of the vaccine and its limited useful life. The Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, for example, requires temperatures below freezing, lasts only five days in regular refrigeration and, once opened, should be administered within a few hours.

Storage requirements also make this vaccine a challenge to administer in some parts of the country, including rural areas with a lack of uniformly distributed medical centers. Cities, especially in mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, also have health deserts, which has meant that people in these communities are vaccinated at a lower rate.

These disparities and problems with the launch have been a source of restraint over who should receive the photos that, for whatever reason, would end up in the trash. In late December, Hasan Gokal, a doctor who worked in Houston, Texas, had six hours to administer the remaining 10 doses of that day’s vaccines. He ended up giving it to people in the community around – including the sick and the elderly, as well as his wife – and shortly thereafter, Gokal was fired and accused of stealing the 10 doses. Had it not been for his quick thinking, doses of the vaccine would have been wasted and the charges dropped. But the incident still raises the question: where is the line between benefiting from a limited resource and following the mandatory course of action?

While prioritizing at-risk groups is ideal, there is not always enough time to find those most in need. Supplies are limited, so making use of everything, even if the injections are given to people for whom they were not given, is critical, experts say. “A vaccine in one arm will always be better than a vaccine in a trash can,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University, told NPR.

Here are three stories, edited and condensed for clarity, from people in the United States who were lucky enough to get a vaccine by chance.

Mark Sussman, 36, Washington, DC

I think I slept two hours in the night after we took our pictures.

I’ve been reading about the vaccine launch and this article appeared in my Google feed about someone from Safeway here in DC being pulled out of the hall and getting an injection. So I said to my wife, “Hey, why don’t you call?” We live four blocks from Safeway and we can get there in, like, five minutes.

So my wife called on Saturday morning, and they wrote down our names and date of birth, because I think they were prioritizing based on age. And then, Monday, at 7 am, when we were putting our 9-month-old daughter to sleep, we got a call from Safeway saying they had doses for both of us if we could get there in 10 minutes.

We started frantically calling all of our neighbors, trying to get someone to sit in the house with Hannah while we were going, because we knew it would only take, like, 30 minutes and the likelihood of her waking up was very low. But as soon as our neighbor came through the door, Hannah woke up. I had already left – I jumped on my bike and cycled there. So my wife decided not to try to put our daughter back to bed and instead, it played her in her little snow suit and in the stroller. Hannah was screaming at the top of her lungs as my wife ran down the street like she was stealing from her. It was funny because this was my daughter’s first time in a store, so as soon as they walked in, my daughter’s eyes lit up.

Courtesy of Mark Sussman

I think from start to finish, it took about 45 minutes. And there were about 10 or 15 other people who were vaccinated alongside us in some similar circumstances.

Normally, I would have been eligible for the vaccine probably in early April. I was following the process of distributing the vaccine very closely, especially to my parents. Both my mom and dad have underlying health problems and have not yet met their granddaughter, so that was my main motivation for getting vaccinated. Now they are vaccinated and will come in a week and a half for a visit for the first time, so this is a big deal.

Ella Feldman, 21, Houston, Texas

On the Monday after the winter storm Uri arrived, our energy dropped in the morning for about half an hour. My roommate, Pilar, and me, students at Rice University, were kind of wandering around and couldn’t really do any of the schoolwork because we didn’t have wi-fi. When our energy returned, we almost immediately received emails saying, “Vaccines are on campus. Come now.”

It had snowed the night before, which is crazy in Texas, and there was black ice everywhere. We were in pajamas and threw jackets on, I grabbed my hat and ran out the door.

We are a 20-minute walk from campus, so we ran and they told us to go to the east gym. There was a line that I discovered now was probably 1,000 people and they said in the email that they had 1,000 vaccines. At this point, no one knew why they had the vaccine, but a Harris County Public Health freezer was found to have broken because of a power outage and its backup generators were not working. When they realized they had no way of storing vaccines, the priority was places with mass distribution and medical staff to be able to administer the vaccines – that’s why they ended up choosing Rice.

We stood in line for half an hour and I was feeling very desperate until I met a friend who knew they were also vaccinating at the Methodist Hospital. So, we got off the line and crossed the street towards the hospital. I was very safe with Covid and I hadn’t been with so many people, so it was kind of stressful, but we were also getting our vaccine. We filled out some papers and everything happened very quickly. It felt like a fever dream.

Courtesy of Ella Feldman

I didn’t really feel like I needed it and I’m really sad that the freezer broke because it meant that they had, like, 5,000 vaccines to distribute and it wasn’t necessarily for priority people. There were many 20 year olds like me.

Rice is a very privileged group of people in Houston, and it didn’t seem that the opportunity to get vaccinated was passed on to the greater Houston community – it looked like it was passed on to people who lived in the neighborhood, which is very wealthy.

I would like the vaccine to be treated in a number of different ways. But the fact that they were able to redistribute them all and not waste a vaccine was very good. So I felt like I was doing my part by running over there and having my arm ready.

David Macmillan, 31, Washington, DC

It was New Year’s Day and I was buying some groceries at Giant with a friend. I knew that the vaccine had been made available in commercial pharmacies for health professionals who were not affiliated with a hospital, but I did not know that this particular warehouse had the vaccine in the pharmacy.

So my friend and I were passing through the pharmacy area and we saw the pharmacist talking to an older woman and trying to convince her to get a vaccine. I think the woman was not sure, so the pharmacist turned to both of us and said: “Hey, I have two doses of Moderna vaccine because people with an appointment didn’t show up. We close in 10 minutes and I will have to throw them away if I don’t give them to anyone. Do you want them? “And I said,” Oh, definitely sign us up. ” I had the impression that the pharmacist had been trying to find someone who took it for some time and finding many people who were skeptical.

I was definitely not skeptical.

Courtesy of David Macmillan

As I grew up, I lived in a cult community in central Kentucky that was unscientific and anti-vaccine, so I didn’t get vaccinated when I was a kid. But when I reached adulthood, I majored in physics, which tends to dissuade you from believing in conspiracy theories, so I’m very pro-science and education now.

I was posting a lot of educational TikToks about the vaccine and why it is safe, so I asked my friend to make a video of me taking the photo, which I posted on TikTok and got a lot of attention. I think it now has 1.6 million views.

When I posted it, I was thinking about that older woman the pharmacist approached first, who needed the vaccine more than I did, but didn’t want to get it. I thought that maybe my post would get people excited about the vaccine and reassure skeptics.

Many comments in the video were either envious or to be congratulated, but there were also hundreds who said: “You will die in a week”, “Great job getting the microchip” or “Your body, your choice. ”There are so many people who don’t understand how vaccines work, and it’s frustrating because we need people to be more informed.

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