Minutes to schedule vaccine — in Alaska
I’ve got good news and bad on the coronavirus front.
The good news is that I was able to get an appointment for a COVID-19 vaccination this Thursday afternoon.
The bad news is that it’s at a Costco in Anchorage, Alaska.
I mean, that’s a long flight from Los Angeles, and the round-trip fare is $581 on Alaska Airlines. And this was for the Moderna vaccine, which requires two shots, so to go through with this would cost me $1,162 in travel.
Like many seniors, I got confused last week by the flurry of mixed messages about who could get vaccinated in Los Angeles County. And when I couldn’t schedule anything locally, despite spending hours on the Kroger site and searching for information on both the county and the City of Pasadena websites, I got curious about other states, many of which reportedly have had better rollouts than California.
I don’t know why it is that after waiting months and months for the development of vaccines, federal, state and local governments have so bollocksed up the distribution of the life-saving medication, even as the death toll approaches 400,000.
Last week, when The Times reported that California had used only a fraction of its available vaccines, Palos Verdes Estates resident Norman Eagle was ticked off at California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. County officials. The senior citizen was also confused, as were many others, about Newsom’s call for those 65 and older to begin getting the vaccine — a recommendation that included no details about how or where to accomplish that.
“My personal attempts to find out about getting vaccinated has been extremely frustrating,” said Eagle, one of several seniors who told me about their desire to crack the system and get the protection they’ve been waiting on for months.
On Jan. 13, Eagle scheduled a vaccination for himself at a Ralphs on Jan. 26.
“But when I physically went there the next day to see if I could get an earlier appointment,” Eagle said, “they told me all scheduled appointments are going to be canceled because L.A. County intervened and said [Ralphs] can’t give shots to 65 and older until all health care workers and first responders get theirs.”
Ralphs is owned by Kroger, and when I heard late last week that some people were able to get vaccinations, or at least make appointments on the Kroger.com website, I spent a lot of time over the next few days trying but failing to get an appointment myself. Dr. Gene Dorio, an elder-care specialist who makes house calls in Santa Clarita, told me to keep trying, because his wife had gotten an appointment for mid-february.
So I kept trying, even though it seemed a little strange to me that I might end up going to a supermarket for a life-saving vaccination. That’s a shopping list I never thought I’d write: pound of ground beef, sack of potatoes, head of lettuce, 12-pack of beer and a coronavirus vaccination.
If L.A. County officials didn’t want Ralphs to jump the gun here, because we still had hundreds of thousands of front-line healthcare workers to vaccinate before moving on to 65-year-olds, I was OK with that reasoning. It does, however, conflict with what Newsom had said.
But as The Times has reported, lots of healthcare workers have been reluctant to get vaccinated, including 40% of the employees at the Los Angeles Fire Department. As of Friday, The Times reported, only 40% had been inoculated, and Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas was giving them a nudge by entering vaccinated firefighters into a raffle with prizes including home security cameras, bicycles and gift cards funded by the nonprofit LAFD Foundation.