How do people accidentally get the Covid-19 vaccine

While the patchwork process of spreading Covid-19 vaccines across the country continues, many Americans have tried to scramble to find a dose for themselves or their loved ones. In the midst of the chaos, stories arose happy people who occur in situations where vaccines were available. In January, a CVS Client on a trip randomly vaccinated Hot Pockets for sale. In Oregon, a snowstorm caused health workers to get stuck in a traffic jam to vaccinate stranded drivers on a highway.

These stories evoke feelings of hope and envy, because although the rate of spread has increased in recent months – as of March 1, there were 22.99 vaccinations per 100 people in the US. – there are still processes and obstacles to getting as many shots in the arms as possible.

One of the biggest problems is the preservation of the vaccine and its limited shelf life. The Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, for example, requires temperatures below freezing, lasts only five days during regular cooling and must be administered within hours as soon as it is opened.

The storage requirements also makes this vaccine a challenge to administer in some parts of the country, including rural areas with a lack of proportionate medical centers. Cities, especially in most black and Spanish neighborhoods, also have health deserts, which has led to people in these communities being vaccinated at a lower rate.

These differences and problems with the deployment were a source of controversy over who would get the shots that would end up in the trash for whatever reason. At the end of December, Hasan Gokal, a doctor in Houston, Texas, had six hours to administer ten remaining doses of the vaccinations of the day. Eventually he gave it to people from the surrounding community – including the sick and the elderly as well as his wife – and shortly thereafter, Gokal was fired and charged with theft of the ten doses. If he did not think quickly, the vaccine doses would have been wasted, and the charges have since been dropped. However, the incident still begs the question: where is the boundary between benefiting from a limited resource and following the assignment?

Although the priority of risk groups is ideal, there is not always enough time to find the needy. Stocks are limited, so it is critical to make use of everything, even if shots are fired at people for whom they were not intended. “A vaccine in an 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 summarized for clarity, of people across the United States who are lucky enough to happen to get a vaccine.

Mark Sussman (36), Washington, DC

I think I slept two hours a night after we shot.

I’ve read about the deployment of vaccines and this article appeared in my Google feed about someone at Safeway here in DC getting pulled out of the aisle and getting a shot. Then I said to my wife, ‘Why don’t you call?’ We live four blocks from the Safeway and we can be there in five minutes.

So my wife called Saturday morning, and they took down our names and our date of birth, because I think they prioritize based on age. And then on Monday at 7am, 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 be there within 10 minutes.

We started calling all our neighbors furiously and trying to get someone to sit in the house with Hannah because we knew it would only be 30 minutes and the probability of her waking up was pretty low. But as soon as our neighbor walks in the door, Hannah wakes up. I have already left – I jump on my bike and bike there. So my wife decided not to try to put our daughter back in bed thrown her in her little snow suit and in the stroller. Hannah screamed at the top of her lungs as my wife ran down the street as if stealing her. It was funny because it was my daughter’s first time in a store, and as soon as they walked in, my daughter’s eyes just lit up.

Thanks to 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 next to us under similar circumstances.

Usually I would probably have been eligible for the vaccine in early April. I followed the distribution of vaccines mainly for my parents. Both my mom and dad have underlying health conditions and they have not met their granddaughter yet, so that was my main motivation to be vaccinated. Now they are both vaccinated and they are coming in a week and a half for the first time to visit it, so it’s a big deal.

Ella Feldman (21), Houston, Texas

The Monday after the winter storm hit Uri, our power went off for about half an hour in the morning. My roommate, Pilar, students at Rice University, and I were just crawling around and could not really do any of our schoolwork because we did not have wifi. When our power went on again, we almost got emails saying, ‘Vaccines are on campus. Come on. ”

It snowed the night before, which is crazy in Texas, and everywhere there was black ice. We were in our pajamas and threw on top of coats, I got my little bucket hat and we ran out the door.

We are a 20 minute walk from campus, so we jog over and tell ourselves to go to the eastern gym. There were probably 1000 people I gathered now, and they said in the email they had 1,000 vaccinations. At this point, no one knew why they had the vaccine, but it appears that a freezer at Harris County Public Health broke down due to a power outage and that their backup generators were not working. When they realized they could not save the vaccines, their priorities were to have mass distribution sites and the medical staff to administer vaccines – this is how they finally chose Rice.

We stood in line for half an hour and I felt really hopeless until I ran into a friend who heard that they were also being vaccinated at Methodist Hospital. So we ran outside the queue and went across the street to the hospital. I was very safe and had not been to so many people yet, so it was quite stressful, but we also got our vaccine. We filled out paperwork, and it all happened so fast. It felt like a fever dream.

Thanks to Ella Feldman

I really did not feel I needed it, and I am very sad that the freezer broke because it meant they had 5,000 vaccinations to spend, and it was not necessarily for priority people. There were a lot of 20-year-olds like me.

Rice is a very privileged group of people in Houston, and it does not seem like the chance of being vaccinated is being broadcast to the greater Houston community – it seems to be being broadcast to people who live in the area, who are very rich .

I wish the vaccine would be treated differently in so many ways. But the fact that they could all spread again and not waste a vaccine was really good. So I felt I was doing my part by running there and having my arm ready.

David Macmillan, 31, Washington, DC

It was New Year’s Day and I went to pick up some groceries at Giant’s with a friend. I knew the vaccine was made available by commercial pharmacies to health professionals who were not affiliated with a hospital, but I did not know that the specific grocery store had the vaccine in the pharmacy.

So my friend and I walk past the pharmacy, and we see the pharmacist talking to an older woman and trying to convince her to take a vaccine. I think the woman was unsure, so the pharmacist turned to the two of us and said, ‘Hey, so I got two doses of the Moderna vaccine because the people with the appointments didn’t show up. We close within ten minutes and I’ll have to throw it away if I don ‘t give it to anyone. Do you want them? “And I was like, ‘Oh, definitely, sign us up.’ I got the impression that the pharmacist had been trying to get someone to take it for a while and came across a lot of people who were skeptical.

I was certainly not skeptical.

Thanks to David Macmillan

When I was growing up, I lived in a cult community in central Kentucky, which was anti-scientific and anti-vaccine, so I did not get vaccinated when I was a kid. But once I reached adulthood, I got a degree in physics, which you tend to believe you from conspiracy theories, so I am now very scientific and educational.

I have been posting a lot of educational TikToks about the vaccine and why it is safe, so I asked my friend to take a video of how I get the chance, which I posted on TikTok and it got a lot of attention. I think it now has 1.6 million views.

When I post this, I think of the older woman who approached the pharmacist first, who needed the vaccine more than I did but did not want to get it. I thought maybe my post would excite people about the vaccine and reassure the skeptics.

Many comments on the video were jealous or congratulatory, but there were also hundreds such as: ‘You’ll be dead in a week’, ‘Good job getting the microchip’, or ‘Your body, your choice. “There are so many people who do not understand how vaccines work, and it’s frustrating because we need to keep people more informed.

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