Thanks guys. Before today I had no idea what ‘black helicopters’ meant. Now, thanks to @mike_g and Wikipedia, i get it, a little.
I also just got my first shot today - a pfizer version at Brigham and Women’s hospital downtown Boston. That place is quite fancy, and they’ve got a very large scale operation there.
My arm hurts!
So glad you got it @bostrav59! Did you see that Charlie Baker said yesterday he was going to include type 1s along with type 2s for vaccine eligibility? Now they just need “a couple of days” to get it into the system…! Hope you continue feeling fine!
@bostrav59, glad to hear it!
With respect to black helicopters, you’ve got it right. Man, oh man, 2020 has provided ample grist for the conspiracy mills… A contentious election, a pandemic, masks, etc.
Nah… That’s a stock market scam - they’re trying to persuade you to buy MS shares so they can sell the options they have at a profit. When it turns out BillG ain’t got no roberts the price will crash and they can buy more options.
As for the heliocophters; buy green ones (they’re really cheap now) and buy lots of this:
https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Oleum-7578838-Professional-Performance-Enamel/dp/B000PIEWLA
Little bit of hard work (wear a mask), loads-a-money.
Ha. My wife (Andy) 'phoned our local FQHC yesterday and got an appointment, for both of us, today at 1:35PM. This was because I read this in an email I got from Oregon two days ago (too late to phone them):
Federally Qualified Health Centers can vaccinate anyone they serve
As of March 26, all of Oregon’s COVID-19 vaccine-enrolled Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) can vaccinate anyone – regardless of whether they are outside the state’s currently eligible groups – to ensure the COVID-19 vaccine is distributed equitably to all people in Oregon.
Oregon’s FQHCs reach people who might not otherwise have access to health care.
In early March, Oregon started a pilot program to allow some FQHCs to offer COVID-19 vaccinations to anyone they serve — even if that person does not fall into currently eligible category — to immunize people most affected by the virus, such as agricultural workers. The program has improved access to vaccination so much that Governor Kate Brown and OHA decided every FQHC should have this flexibility.
FQHCs will reach out to their patients and communities to schedule the vaccinations.
Well… the local one will vaccinate anyone, indeed this is the way providers are working in Oregon - every provider will vaccinate any eligible person. Assuming it all goes well I will cancel my April 9 appointment with my family NP, no counting eggs here…
This is probably a good thing - Josephine County Oregon seems to have one of the lowest vaccination rates in the whole of Oregon and Oregon is below average.
Good for you! My family got vaccinated yesterday thanks to people that didn’t show up for a mass vaccination drive. Our fire department sent out a message and got the unused one used. Good to see things working the way I think most of imagine they should.
Yes, it worked! It was the Moderna vaccine so we have to get a second dose (I would have much preferred the single dose vaccine from JnJ), but we have an appointment for April 29, so we can aim to book travel from March 13 on.
PCR testing still seems to be a bit messed up in Oregon; we took the opportunity to get a heads-up from the testing tent just outside where we got the vaccination. The person there had to go elsewhere for travel to Hawaii because that state doesn’t recognize her own test location, her results were 12 hours late so she had to quarantine, I think for the whole time…
That kind of mess pretty much rules out the opportunity for my wife to visit her family - she checked today and Taiwan still requires a valid test on entry and, even then, requires 14 days in isolation (like, on your own in a hotel room that you pay for - not like Hawaii).
Glad you got vaccinated.
It’s interesting to see what’s actually happening overseas with vaccinations. We’ve been really lucky here in Australia in regards to numbers of confirmed cases etc. Although my state just came out of a 3 day lockdown to stop community transmission of the UK strain brought in by returning Australians
I’m booked in for my first dose of the AstraZeneca on 14 April.
The population has been put into categories. I’m in the 1b category. 1a were frontline workers etc, and so they got it first, although I believe they predominantly got the Pfizer, but the Australian govt couldn’t secure anymore doses of that.
The online booking system was rushed out and no surprises, it crashed. My parents had their first vaxx on Tuesday last week after calling rather than trying to book in online. So did I, but even though I called the day after they did, I added an extra 2 weeks to my wait time. 
Oh well. As I said, Aussies have been so fortunate. Being a big island at the bottom of the planet has certainly helped us in this case! https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/covid-19-vaccines/getting-vaccinated-for-covid-19/when-will-i-get-a-covid-19-vaccine
So, 6 months on, it’s worth coming back to this. You and your government were right on all those points; we have a another wave and I think Canada is pretty much ahead of the game now:
Which is part of this article. (The numbers there go above 100% because some of the vaccines require 2 doses.) OWID has a page which summarizes the figures for full vaccination (the caveats can be read on the page):
Canada is up there, ahead of both the UK and the US by a long way - remember, what matters is not the % of people who are vaccinated, rather it is the percentage who are not. Canada is at 32.12% (67.88% of Canadian residents are fully vaccinated), the UK at 36.05% (63.95% of UK residents are fully vaccinated) and the US at 47.34%; 47% worse than Canada because only 52.66% of US residents are fully vaccinated.
I read complaints on FUD (not in the politics thread) from residents that the CA government wasn’t providing vaccines fast enough, but at the end of the day a government does not work alone and Canada has achieved a rate of vaccination that any reasonable person is proud of. Not that it can’t be improved of course, but I think you guys got there by working together 
Wow. What is this strange language you speak? In the US that isn’t a familiar term!
I’m not sure how we got there, but “working together” makes it sound better than it was! For all the b*tchinig and whining and finger-pointing that goes on, it’s amazing we achieved anything. There were obstacles along the way (Pfizer slowdowns while they upgraded their plant, then Moderna slowdowns, then an AZ export ban from India, then all the AZ adverse reaction kerfuffle, then contaminated J&J), and then each province insisted on reinventing the wheel when it came to rollouts (Ontario completely left family doctors out of the process, and even now many of them can’t give shots), so once vaccines were available I think there was simply a lot of eagerness just to get it done already. It hasn’t been problem-free, and there’s typically muted Canadian pride in what we’ve achieved, and we still face the fourth wave, but yeah, thanks for noticing! 