The Quest for the H1N1 vaccine #2

Wizened by last week's H1N1 experience, Saeeda and I spent the last few days strategizing which clinic to attend to get the vaccine for Nuha. I know that we've moved beyond the rational with our panicky approach, but we're parents. We're not supposed to be rational entities anymore.

Son on Friday, after poring over the clinic information and mapping out distances to each, Saeeda and I settled on a Sunnyvale clinic. At 6:30am on Saturday I was awake and dressed. Armed with a water bottle and some reading material, I was ready to be dropped off to hold a place in line for the vaccine.

Saeeda dropped my off by 7am, but already there was a line wrapping around the clinic building. The staff had resorted to handing out numbers to people so that entire families did not have to wait in the morning drizzle. You took the number and came back with your family at the assigned time. However, it was the line for these numbers itself that wrapped around the clinic.

By around 8am things started moving as the folks at the very front of the line began to receive numbers (the clinic wasn't set to open until 9:30am, but they decided to hand out the numbers earlier). Still, the going was slow because people were being interviewed about the number of high risk individuals in their family that needed the shot. Given that not everyone spoke English fluently, and things started to slow down.

While waiting, I decided to strike up a conversation with the guy in front of me. It turned out, to my surprise, that he was an alum from the University of Chicago. Not only that, but since he had gone on to study law at Northwestern, he knew my cousin (alum of U. of C) and many of my friends who were lawyers in Chicago. Small world.

The line kept moving, the rain kept falling, and I continued texting Saeeda with status updates. But around 9:30am something changed. The line started moving a lot faster, and no one knew what was going on until we rounded the corner and saw that a police officer and clinic staff member were turning people away now. They had run out of vaccine, and were therefore no longer handing out numbers. There was no point in waiting anymore.

I silently cursed fate as I dialed Saeeda to come pick me up. Two weeks now, and I had nothing to show for all the waiting around I had done. Today, the vaccine was gone in 90 minutes. What would this country do if there was a true virus outbreak of pandemic proportions? If California couldn't handle the situation for a limited at-risk population, what would happen if everyone were to need a vaccination because of a lethal virus spreading through the community?

Boggles the mind.