Vaccine Safari!

 

The last time I wanted to be older was when I was 15 and couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license. Now I’m back to acting like a 15-year-old. At 73 I am two years under the initial vaccine rollout age. And rollout isn’t the right term, more like a molasses pour, agonizingly slow.

But I didn’t have to wait till my 75^th birthday after all. A couple of weeks ago the state of Tennessee decreed that counties could lower the age threshold to 70 if they so chose. Many did.

But not Knox County, where I live.

Then the rumor mill got to churning, churning out rumors that turned out to be true: you didn’t have to get your vaccination in the county where you lived. You could get it in any county in the state.

Tennessee is not Rhode Island so it wasn’t like every county was convenient to Knoxville.  

Obion County was one of the first to lower its age threshold to 70 plus. Obion County is 360 miles from Knoxville, a six-hour drive if you don’t have to make a rest stop. In six hours I would have hadnto make, um, probably five.

But soon the dominoes started falling: Unicoi, Hancock, Greene. But not Knox County. And in fact none of the counties that ring Knox County.

No matter. My wife figured out the state’s vaccination website and the map and began signing me up in every East Tennessee county that had lowered its requirement to 70.

That was two weeks ago today. The next Monday we got the first call: there was an appointment opening in White County on Wednesday. Melanie and I looked at each other: Where’s White County? Then, Who cares?

So two days later we drove to Sparta, Tennessee, a wonderful small town 90 minutes from our house.

Wonderful because Sparta was the first place to offer me a vaccination appointment.

I’d seen a friend drive 90 miles to Rhea County (Dayton, site of the Scopes Monkey Trial) a week earlier. And he was 75. I had another friend drive two hours to the Bristol speedway and sit in line two hours to get a shot.

Sparta was a godsend and we were taking it.

The White County Health Department was a tiny building way off the beaten path but that bunch had their act together. We were in line a total of 15 minutes. A National Guardswoman administered the shot – thank you for your service!

We waited 15 minutes in a parking lot across the street for potential side effects that never came. Then it was 90 minutes back home.

I can’t say enough good things about White County and its Health Department.

Which is more than I can say for the state vaccine rollout.  

Just last night our governor was on TV crowing about how all these folks from other states had been calling him, congratulating him on Tennessee's vaccine plan. And I thought, What plan? I'll bet no one from Tennessee is calling him because we all know.

There are caravans of old people riding county to county in desperate search of a shot.

And there are underpaid health department workers dialing number after number, trying to fill up the vaccination schedule.

We have friends in Oak Ridge who drove two hours to McMinnville and another friend in Knoxville who drove an hour to Athens.

On the way back from Sparta, I got a call offering an appointment in Unicoi County, 110 miles east of Knoxville.

Thanks, thanks muchly, but I already got a vaccine. And I only had to drive 90 miles.

You have perhaps noted no mention of any friends getting a vaccine in Knox County. I don’t know of any. I do see a few on the news. Knox County's online sign up page just went up two days ago. Shortly afterward the Knox County Public Health Director announced that the county had lost 1,000 doses of vaccine. They don't know what happened to the box. They think it was mistakenly thrown out. Or maybe it never arrived. That’s it, it was someone else’s fault.

When the governor was congratulating himself for the successful vaccine rollout, he should have been congratulating Tennessee’s old folks who have successfully negotiated a labyrinth of websites that crash, phone lines that are busy and call backs that never happen.

Congratulations to anyone who has gotten a vaccine.

And cheers to anyone who got it effortlessly. Please tell the world how you did it.

The world needs to know.