Why I jumped the queue, twice

Jeff Green | May 26, 2021

By the time this newspaper is printed, I hope to have an appointment to get my second dose of Astrazeneca before the end of May.

The pharmacy where I will get it is located a 30 second walk from my office.

So it shouldn't be a total loss, as my 97 year old aunt likes to say. I might pick up the mail at the Post Office, across the street, and pick up an apple and a tuna fish sandwich for my lunch, at the grocery store, while I am out.

The fact that, as a healthy 60 year old person with no underlying conditions, I am getting a second dose of vaccine out of turn, is not lost on me.

Across the province, people have been struggling to book appointments for their first dose. There are thousands of elderly people in our region who are alone and lonely, not only because of the restrictions but because they will not feel comfortable taking chances because they have co-morbidity. The extra boost from the second dose may not even bring their protection to the level I already enjoy from taking a first dose.

Across the world, people don't even know when vaccines will be available at all.

I don't feel guilty about taking this second dose, however. Like the first dose, this dose comes from a batch of AstraZeneca that is approaching its expiry date, this time in only a few days. With the speed of vaccine development, supply issues, approval protocols in Canada, and a bunch of other factors, the cohort that I joined on my most recent birthday became the only group who could take the first dose of vaccine that came from India. Because I got my dose on March 12, I am part of an even smaller group who have been made eligible for a supply of AstraZeneca vaccine, that has been sitting in fridges for months, first in the United States and later in Canada.

Politics, science, coincidence, and some incompetence, have resulted in this opportunity for me, and if I turn it down, the vaccine may indeed go to waste. In that case, I will end up getting dose of vaccine that someone else will not be getting.

That is motivation number one for me, getting out of the way.

In order for the government to ensure transparency, I had to attest to the fact that the 10 week gap between my vaccines is not optimal for its ability to protect me from COVID 12 weeks is optimal, and I had to attest to the fact that I was aware that vaccines, such as the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, may become available to me if I wait and may offer the same or better protection.

Again, I had no problem with that because I know the science around those two other options was incomplete. Indeed, less than an hour after sending off my attestation in the subject line of an email to my pharmacist, I read that the National Advisory Council on Immunization (NACI) does not recommend so-called mixing and matching of vaccines.

From my understanding of how this community, this province and this country will fare best in the coming months, it is through vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible, with first and second doses.

I know that the “stay-at-home” order, which has been effective in giving the vaccine program a chance to catch up with the spread of COVID variants, is getting harder and harder to maintain. The crowds in my village, in the run-up to the Victoria Day Weekend, were larger than in a normal year, never mind last year during the first COVID “stay-at-home” order. Traffic on Hwy. 7 was very heavy, people were on the move travelling around the province for the long weekend.

People are tired and fed up and they want to get back to their normal social and professional lives. It is not just the COVID deniers who are leading this, it is thousands and thousands of families who are skirting the restrictions here and there, creating small risks that become big risks because of how many people are doing it.

This will only increase in the coming months, no matter how the re-opening plans roll out and how well the stages are designed.

We need to do our best to be safe, we need to get ourselves and our family members vaccinated, and often requires making phone calls, sending emails, and looking for opportunities to get vaccinated instead of waiting for the provincial system to work properly.