Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

http://i.imgur.com/lEoedN5.png

I got the J&J last weekend, on Saturday morning. Zero side effects, but maybe they gave me the placebo!

here’s a story on the UK situation. not great!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/06/england-covid-vaccine-programme-could-slow-sharply-sage-warns

An expat buddy living in Amsterdam says there's basically no vaccine supply in the Netherlands, and they have no idea when they'll be offered... he claims the gov't haggled on prices a little too long and the drug companies took the business elsewhere. I think one of the vaccines is actually produced in Belgium, ironically.

TH, yes, that's the article I saw yesterday, the headline in particular is concerning, "Scientific committee forecasts drop to 2.7m jabs a week until July with little available for first doses"

Andy the Grasshopper, there was a pretty good article about the EU's vaccine challenges in last week's Economist: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/03/31/why-the-eus-covid-19-vaccination-programme-went-wrong

Update on our CVS hell: eventually managed to speak to someone at the store who just said "Oh yes, that's been happening to a few people who didn't check in online when they got here – just come in at the time your cancelled appointment was and we'll be sure to give her the second dose, no problem". I guess we just have to trust him.

Same reaction to the second Moderna shot as the first, only a bit worse: fever, aches, a few hours last night spent shivering then sweating under the blankets. Can't tell if it's passing fast or if that's just the Tylenol working.

BREAKING
MHRA there are still huge benefits of the vaccine in preventing Covid-19 and serious disease.
However, due to a very small number of blood clots in younger people, those under the age of 30 will be offered Pfizer or Moderna instead

— Carl Dinnen (@carldinnen) April 7, 2021

Increasingly feeling like I'm the only dumb chump waiting to get the vax when it's actually 'my turn' (whatever that even means at this point). Almost everyone I know has gotten at least their first jab by now whether they technically qualified for it or not (most did not). So now I've got the twinned anxieties of fearing that nothing will be available once IL opens to all adults and that I'm just absolutely positively for sure going to get the 'vid just before I get the needle in my arm.

Anyway, has anybody linked to this?: https://hidrb.com/ I guess it's set up to text you when and if there are leftover doses in your area. I'm signed up, we'll see if it does what it says on the tin.

xp

Oh great. Why under 30's? Would be nice if we were all given that option considering the clots aren't age related. Instead I'll just have to roll the dice with the poxy oxford one.

I signed up for Dr B, then decided to leverage my pandemic weight gain to bump myself up the priority list

Moderna #2 is IN THERE

xp

Oh great. Why under 30's? Would be nice if we were all given that option considering the clots aren't age related. Instead I'll just have to roll the dice with the poxy oxford one.

Risk/benefit analysis of AZ vaccine by age at low/medium/high exposure risk from Winton Centre as presented at press conference pic.twitter.com/0mimkzQAse

— Theo Sanderson (@theosanderson) April 7, 2021

There was a suggestion too (not proven) that younger women in particular may be more susceptible to these clots

Something something the pill

That's never stopped doctors from prescribing hormonal birth control before.

xp lol/rage

Sure I know, I was looking at the incidence rate myself and thinking “isn’t the pill higher risk than this?”

But yeah, was the first place my mind went to for this reason.

have been thinking a lot about how we basically don't teach the history of vaccinations, and so a lot of the details about these (multiple competing vaccines, different efficacies, distrust) have been lived through in reruns

tbf at the primary public school level we basically don't teach history at all

highly recommend everyone reads eula biss on immunity

Finding it quite impressive that the same people who say no to masks and lockdowns because there's only a miniscule chance of dying from the virus are now up in arms because there's an even smaller chance of having an adverse reaction to the AZ vaccine

highly recommend everyone reads eula biss on immunity

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, April 7, 2021 10:45 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

rt

Finding it quite impressive that the same people who say no to masks and lockdowns because there's only a miniscule chance of dying from the virus are now up in arms because there's an even smaller chance of having an adverse reaction to the AZ vaccine

Well, you see, one is natural, the other is not. Checkmate, muttonface.

there's an even smaller chance of having an adverse reaction to the AZ vaccine

ha, just put it down to me venting my irrational Covid fears in 2021.

lol at "muttonface" -- is that a common way to disparage sheeple?

Not yet, but it's copyright-free.

thank you pomrade

Poms and sheepfuxors

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I think things are going to go badly in Australia on the one hand you basically have zero chance of catching COVID, on the other you have a vaccine which the government has put almost all its faith in because it can be made in Australia and now it has been linked with a small chance of blood clotting.

There’s already a lot of vaccine hesitantly out there, I can see a lot of people refusing AZ, because they’ll see not taking it as lower risk, and they’ll be right. How this plays out is anyone’s guess, it’s the back of the line for any more Pfizer, no moderna or J&J in the pipeline, so fingers heavily crossed for novavax because that’s the only other one Australia, ordered enough of to cover the population.

Your occasional female interjection to remind non-female posters that oral contraceptives are exponentially more risky for blood clots than the AZ vaccine.

Not convinced that the entire readerbase of the Hun are posting itt.

xpost Also ... covid itself!

on the one hand you basically have zero chance of catching COVID

i don't think it's nuts to hold vaccines to higher safety standards than other drugs. (and in fact that is what is done.) they're given to otherwise healthy people to prevent something that is a possibility not a certainty.

Just like the pill!

A little logy I think, 13 hours post dose 2.

Not convinced that the entire readerbase of the Hun are posting itt.

maybe suzy should have gone directly to Scott

I'm allowing for the possibility that a huge number of vaccine slots are going to open all at once when everyone > 16 y.o. becomes eligible in IL on Monday, but after the last several days of cycling through a half dozen vax appt websites to get the lay of the land and seeing maybe a sum total of three (3) appointments become briefly available within 100 miles of me during that time, I'm beginning to feel like I made a big fucking mistake in waiting my turn like a good boy.

most likely it will continue to be the same case for a while. Once I became eligible, I began stalking the various sites that provided appointments. The one that I had the most luck with was Walgreens, but it still required constant refreshing to finally stumble upon an opening.

Moderna #2 side effects lasted 24 hours for me, almost to the hour.

xpost Deniers and anti-vaxxers aside, that nonsense right there is what's gonna result in a lot of people not getting their jabs.

I have to say, I don't know that I could have predicted what a mass vaccination program in 2021 would have looked like but... this isn't what I would have imagined. I know, from this forum and other places online, that folks are going to mass vax site but there is not one single person in my friend or family circles in Illinois has gotten their shot from of them. It's about 85% Walgreen's/CVS/small pharmacies or events specifically set up at/through their work. I guess I would have anticipated the opposite, that more people would be processed through the mass vax sites than pharmacies.

OL - sending you good luck. Seems like the pattern recently has been more appointments opened up at the end of the work week, so maybe that's when places like Walgreen's and CVS get a better handle on the supply levels.

Iirc the places like Walgreens and CVS were just the first to get vaccines, the mass vax sites (at least in IL) seemed to come some time later. But I have family in Nebraska (well, my wife does), and they got their shots in a stadium several weeks ago. And that's Nebraska. So I think it's just a state by state thing, and variations therein.

I became eligible this past Monday and started scouring the web for appointments at midnight, and again for a couple hours in the morning, only to watch them get gobbled up before I could fill out the form. But I broke through and got a spot at a medical center here, then a text from the state saying I could make an appointment at a mass site. (Which I went with, it was a week earlier than the other one.) So, I was frustrated and bitter like a lot of others are, but in the end it was only a few hours of off-and-on screen refreshing and I was set, hopefully others will have the same experience, if not faster.

I know several people in Chicago who have gone to the United Center mass vax site. Almost all had positive accounts of the experience, with some snarkiness of other patients who were sick of waiting in line/waiting to leave reported.

MN state government is apparently opening a mass site at the state fairgrounds in St. Paul, which seems like an ideal location.

FWIW, I would be fine patiently waiting for something to open up when it opens up if not for the thing where every vaccinated/partially vaccinated person I know is all GET YOUR VAX YET HUH HUH DIDJA DIDJA WHATCHA WAITIN FOR HEY YOU VAXXED YET BRUH GETCHER VAX BRUH YOU GOTTA GET VAXXED.

I'm very happy for every one of you, truly. And I will get my vax at the earliest opportunity. I very much want to join your ranks, believe me. Now please back the entire effing eff off of me, please. My persistent low-level anxiety is positively spiking thanks to this barrage of well-meaning pokes in the side.

although going through a pharmacy website was the quickest path for me, it was really only a matter of a few extra days before opportunities to sign up through local county sites started to appear. At least in Texas, each county has it's own system, and some are better than others. It is probably worthwhile to check out not just your own county, but nearby counties as well, just in case it's administered more effectively there.

yeah but that’s no substitute for the real well-meaning poke in the side, the vaccine

sorry jk