They may not have had the staff to give it, either. CVS and Walgreens are both experiencing large numbers of walk-outs and other instances of staff quitting, because of the way they are so poorly treated. Some of the stores in Des Moines, which has a pharmacy school (Drake) have had to close their pharmacies on the weekends, because they have nobody to work there.
And this despite a massive oversupply of pharmacists!
He also told me that his friend, who works for CVS and is based in Kansas, has worked at CVS stores as far away as Waterloo, Iowa. They do pay mileage, and she can theoretically get $90/hr overtime, but they make sure to schedule her for 32 hours a week, enough to get benefits but of course not enough to get OT.
The university has sent us a couple emails saying that all faculty and staff qualify for boosters under the state’s guidelines, if it’s been six months or more since your second dose or 2 months since getting the J&J.
In August the media kept saying 8 months. Is 6 months the standard now, though? I ask because I’ll reach 6 months in a couple of weeks.
There’s certainly a cost benefit analysis. Maybe men under 30 shouldn’t get boosters unless they have a risk factor. Maybe boosters could be allowed, but not recommended, for those under 50. But for most adults, feeling a little sore and tired for one day, which you can schedule to be convenient, is a better deal than a significant risk of being wiped out for 2-4 weeks without warning – which is what “mild covid” seems to look like for a lot of people. And then there’s that risk of long covid that’s not well understood…
Yeah, that’s why I specified “very mild covid.” My daughter basically had a bad cold for less than a week, and her twin was asymptomatic. I’m sure there are cases in between those levels, as well. My point was that some people having a couple of days of bad side effects from vaccination every six or fewer months might, if they are very low risk, add up to the small amount of days they might spend sick with very mild covid. And I’m not really talking about individuals, I’m saying as a policy matter, it’s hard for most people to wrap their heads around the fact that getting vaccinated has a downside that has to be factored in, and it’s not just for the really bad side effects.
I know it’s anecdote and not data, but I was planning to wait until 7 months because I’d heard 8 months was better and I figured I’d split the difference and get the booster just before holiday travel plans. Then, just days before the 6-month mark, both my spouse and I got covid. She got quite sick.
I read that, at 6 months the overall effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines is about 66% (including asymptomatic cases). So, delaying can give you more protection out into the future, but you are more vulnerable while you are delaying. And for myself, I’m glad my spouse and I got sick before the 6 month mark, because I would have been seriously kicking myself if we’d gotten sick during the time I’d planned to delay.
Oh sure. That’s why i suggested they be allowed for all (or at least most), not recommended. Surely there’s a middle ground between “you can’t have this” and “your employer will be fined if you don’t do this”.
Huh, I’m surprised people are having trouble again. All my local friends who want a booster have signed up, and no one has experienced any problems other than a couple who experienced pangs of guilt because they lied about their eligibility.
Even the kids vaccines seem to be rolling or pretty smoothly. The first couple of days parents were jockeying to get earlier appointments, hoping to protect their kids as much as possible before Thanksgiving. But those were parents who said things like, “the school is having a clinic in two weeks, but i got an appointment at a pharmacy in three days.”
Pangs of guilt alleviated. One got his shot two days ago, the other is scheduled for next week, and she’ll actually be legal and eligible by the time she shows up at the appointment.
(FDA just authorized boosters for all adults, CDC expected to sign on shortly.)
We have appointments for our kids, but when I first scheduled them, the ones I selected kept disappearing because someone else got it first. I scheduled them both in late December. I kept checking back, and was able to reschedule them sooner, but one kid is scheduled way across town. I just recently checked to see if I could move it to the closer pharmacy, but at that time, there were no appointments anywhere within 90 miles with that pharmacy chain.
I haven’t tried scheduling a booster yet, because I can’t get one yet, but I assume it’s easier. Several pharmacies didn’t have kids vaccine appointments set up in their systems yet last week. But all of them had boosters in their online appointment system.
ETA: I just checked a different pharmacy and there’s one kid appointment available 25 miles away in the next 14 days – that chain doesn’t schedule further out than that. There are some first come first served clinics available, so if we wanted to go stand in line, that would be possible, I think.
Granted, I was only looking at one provider (CVS), but they have a number of locations in my area (western suburbs of Chicago), and it was hard to find any appointments, unless I looked out more than a couple of days.
My friends were scrambling to grab those appointments, too. But I think I’ve seen all the kid-just-got-vaxxed shots by now, and none of them was driving 90 miles.
I guess, I don’t think “I can book a variety of appointments near me, but need to wait until next week” is anything like how it was when the initial vax rolled out, and people were up until 1am when new appointments popped up, or repeatedly hang out at CVS at the end of the day hoping for an “extra”, or otherwise spending hours of time trying to obtain any appointment at all. Maybe it was easier where you were. But around here, the first round was a nightmare, and now it’s just “go to the website of a pharmacy near you, and pick something that’s not too inconvenient”.
Here, too; I spent hours, over the course of a couple of weeks in late March, trying to find a place for the first shot for my wife and myself, and we finally wound up having to drive three hours, to downstate Illinois, to get it.
Three weeks later, we were able to easily get the second shot at a mass vaccination site five minutes from our house. Things changed really quickly.
We all got appointments for a second dose when we got our first dose. So you might have had to re-do an inconvenient drive, but you only had to struggle to find an appointment if you wanted something more convenient.
Around here, for first shots in March, anybody who could find an appointment, at least in my friends circle, was telling all their friends/family as soon as they’d booked their own. I had done my daily check (I was able to stay home at that point in the year, and wasn’t going to spend hours every day online as some were doing) and concluded there still weren’t any appointments anywhere near me; and then I got emails from two different friends and checked again and things had just opened up; there were suddenly lots of appointments on sites that hadn’t had any a short time before, including in two different directions about twenty minutes’ drive away from me. The area as a whole must have just gotten shipments of vaccine in.
Second shots were scheduled along with the first. Boosters six or seven months later turned out to be no big deal; there were appointments available but I was able to get mine as a walk-in. I don’t know what’s happened since children were approved, though; I wouldn’t be surprised it that’s caused a temporary backup.
Does anyone know when NYT will change its vaccine tracking chart’s age categories? At present, the lowest ages are still given as “All ages* *Includes those not yet eligible for the vaccine”, then “12 and up”. It seems like there ought to be a “5 and up” row (and a “booster or additional shot” column).
Grrr. None of the pharmacies around here will let you schedule to get a booster that’s a different brand than your first 2 shots (so if you’ve you’ve had Pfizer it’ll only offer you slots with Pfizer availability) despite the state Covid page saying it’s fine to mix and match if you want to.