Daily if not hourly. Way beyond exhausting.
Well, I’ve been reading this thread, thinking I’ll be the last Doper here, but I just got an appointment for next week. My prediction was only off by a couple days!
Which is why I said f-it and took an appointment 2.5 hours from me. I could just see myself refreshing 45 individual pharmacy websites for a week, smoke out my ears. Or I just do a big drive and get jabbed. Not a hard choice.
I feel terrible for the rest of my area dealing with this nonsense. MyTurn.ca.gov should be an actually useful website: it schedules you for vaccination; instead it texts you: Hey you’re eligible, check vaccinefinder, which sends you to disconnected pharmacy sites where you enter zipcodes of where the pharmacies are, over and over. Sorry, no appointments! And you enter another zipcode: “let’s try the next town over?” Rinse repeat. This system is working: people get vaccinated. But wtf.
squeegee, are you awake yet? There are appointments in the Sand City CVS as a I type, and they’re giving the J&J vaccine there.
Ha, son of a gun. Not Sand City, but I found a J&J appointment at a Wallgreen’s in Monterey at 1pm today. A 40 minute drive instead of 2.5 hours. I took that appointment, but now I’m sitting here fretting about declining a 95% vaccine for a 67% vaccine, and wondering if I should just take the big drive. 
Thanks for thinking of me, Teela!
Agree. People are getting vaccinated in spite of the system. It’s personal perseverance that succeeds, nothing that any system I’ve found that helps.
Fauci’s advice is to take whichever vaccine you can get soonest.
But I can get either, today, with some effort.
Then go with the one that will give you the most peace of mind, even if it adds some extra hours of driving. You are still leaving the J and J for someone who can’t do the long drive.
Make a day of it, an excursion with a stop for a nice lunch and a another stop for dinner at some new place on the way home. A walk in a park you have never been to or a visit to a new and different bookstore or hobby store.
Agree. I get to get out of the house, and it’s a pretty time of year here: brilliant green grass on the hills as I go over Pacheco Pass sounds pretty nice. And yes, 95% gives me a lot more peace of mine.
And my J&J hesitancy isn’t just on my behalf: I don’t want to have a 33% chance I could get infected and give Covid to someone else.* Hell, almost my whole deal with this disease is wanting to not be part of the problem. Mask up. Distance. Don’t be an idiot. Prevent spread. Getting Moderna because I can just seems more responsible to me.
*Yes, I know it’s not quite known if vaccines prevent asymptomatic spread, but the early studies seem to indicate they do.
And you are also leaving that J and J for someone who doesn’t have a car or who can’t make a nice day out of the drive. So you are definitely being part of the solution! High five 
!
The incremental 3 hours driving is insignificant compared to all the time you’ve invested and will invest in COVID avoidance.
Whelp sorta good news? I called Walgreen’s and they had no record of me having an appointment today. The Walgreen’s website did act quite messed up when I made the appointment, and apparently it didn’t actually go through. It gave me a conf# but no email or text afterwards that I had an appointment. Someone else had already snagged my 1pm, so yay? @BippityBoppityBoo more evidence of our wonderful appointment system in action. 
I am most def bringing my confirmation doc to my 5pm Rite Aid appointment!
Hah, when Mr. brown went to his first appointment in Gilroy (a Santa Clara County sponsored vaccination event) back in February, they had no record of his appointment, either. But they gave him a vaccine anyway.
Costco just opened up a lot of appointments at many of their stores. I don’t think you need to be a member.
You don’t have to be a Costco member for anything pharmacy related in my area. I’m guessing that it’s universal.
Kaiser is also giving vaccines to nonmembers.
I found a bunch of appointments available at Costco about an hour away from my city a little while back. The appointment availability was good, but their scheduling website went down multiple times while I was trying to schedule. I did snag an appointment eventually, but it was hours after I had started trying. I hope they’ve beefed that up.
The Costco vaccine site offers only 20 states. None of which are the two states I need to find appts in (for family members).
Huh. Costco doesn’t show up on VaccineFinder. So I went to their website → pharmacy → book appointment → another website. And the Costcos in Gilroy, Santa Cruz, and south San Jose are claimed not to exist on that site after typing those zip codes.
Yeah, that probably explains it.
I got in to the Costco pharmacy / other website for awhile, just to click around and see how it worked. I found a few local-ish Costcos offering appointments, but every one was J&J.