The Vaccine Needs to Go Viral

Everyone I know is getting the same runaround. Even though close friends and I fit the profile (late 60s to late 70s, preexisting health conditions etc.), we still can’t get immunized against COVID. I registered with the San Francisco vaccine site and was notified that I qualify for a shot, and was directed to my health provider. But a recorded message at my clinic — Mercy Doctors, connected to St. Mary’s, one of the biggest hospitals in SF — informs patients that the vaccine has still not been delivered to them and suggests... you guessed it, that we contact SF.gov. In other words, the old runaround.

Yes, the vaccine distribution system is a mess — a cluster fuck of problems that started because Trump was too busy trying to pull off a coup to make the medical emergency a top priority. A few people I know have managed to get the vaccine, by being lucky, by donating money to a hospital, by driving to a different county, by jumping the line. In other words, like always in this dog-eat-dog country, you have to hustle, to know somebody to get inoculated against the deadly disease. To live.

I don’t want to elbow other people out of the way who are more deserving than I am — those who are 75 and older, medical workers and other frontline heroes, nursing home residents and employees — and prison inmates, for god’s sake, who’ve been sacrificed to the pandemic. But when it’s my turn — and according to the SF.gov guidelines, it IS now my turn — I want to get my place in line without working the system like a K Street lobbyist.

But it’s not just a distribution problem, it’s a production bottleneck. Pfizer and Moderna, the two pharmaceutical manufacturers whose COVID vaccines are approved so far, have stated they will produce enough shots for 100 million people BY APRIL. That’s not good enough. We need over 200 million Americans immunized as soon as possible. The Biden administration needs to intervene under the Defense Production Act and vastly increase the vaccine supply by contracting with other pharmaceutical companies to produce the government-approved vaccines. During medical emergencies like this, no pharmaceutical company should have monopolies on supply.

The old, the frail, the incarcerated, the at-risk workers should not have to hustle to survive the plague.