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Feature
Shot ChaserS
Two writers dive into the botched vaccine rollout and report back
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Confessions of an Unrepentant Vaccine ‘Cheater’
by Daniel Hill
When I got the email confirming my appointment to receive the first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, I damn near threw my laptop across the room as if it were on fire. I had just over an hour to get from my home in St. Louis County to the Belle-Clair Fairgrounds mass vaccination site in Belleville, Illinois, and I was feeling the pressure. In a half-panic, I frantically gathered up all the things I would need. eys Photo ID Phone charger Oh shit, it’s free ing outside — jacket It’s a small miracle I remembered to put pants on in the mad scramble. My hands were trembling with excitement as I prepared to leave, so much so that I had to have my fianc e enter the address to the site on my phone’s GPS for me. When I got outside to my car I determined that there simply wasn’t enough time to properly scrape all of the ice from my windshield, so I used my bare hands to claw away just enough to see what was in front of me, relying on the heater’s defrost setting to do the rest. Within minutes, I was Illinoisbound, racing down I- 0 while peering through a half-frosted windshield and frantically calling my family and friends in the hopes they would luck out in the same wholly unlikely way I had.
It was February 1 , and I had been wrapping up work near the tail end of an otherwise uneventful Friday when I noticed something intriguing in the back-end of the RFT’s blogging platform: One of our new interns this semester, Jack illeen, was working on a story with the temporary headline “Getting vaccinated (title work in progress).”
“What’s all this, then?” I wondered. Jack, I know, is a younger fella, much younger than I. So how was he getting a vaccine? Being that I am unashamedly nosey (what kind of reporter would I be if I weren’t?) I clicked on the halfwritten post and started reading.
Jack’s prose spoke of vaccine chasers whose attempts to get needles into their arms were often centered around finding vials that were set to expire or otherwise go to waste. e wrote about an event in Belleville that he’d heard had opened to the public at large after being unable to find enough willing recipients. “The Belleville Fairgrounds are doing a drive thru covid vaccine event tomorrow-this weekend and need people to sign up so the vaccines don’t go to waste,” he’d been told in a text message by a family member, who shared a link and a registration code — both of which I was now staring at in the post.
It was as though I’d stumbled upon a secret trove of forbidden knowledge. In disbelief, I copied and pasted the RL into my browser’s search bar and pressed enter. When prompted, I typed in the registration code and was shocked when it worked, allowing me access to a site that asked for my personal information.
I answered each question honestly — I live in Missouri, I’m in my 30s, I’m not a health-care worker, I’m fat but not quite fat enough for it to be dubbed a comorbidity, etc. — and clicked to schedule an appointment for the following afternoon. The computer told me the slot I’d attempted to sign up for was now taken, and in fact, every Saturday slot was gone. I tried the same for Sunday and saw the same outcome — though these appointments were available when I initially selected them, by the time I submitted the form I was told they were filled. It seemed to me
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Shot ChaserS
by Jack Killeen
Ifirst heard of the elusive “vaccinated 23-year-old” scenario a month ago. I was in Indiana, visiting my brother, and we were in the kitchen with his fiancée Shannon. Shannon’s a third-year medical student at Indiana University. As she pulled a sheet of cookies out of the oven and laid it onto the stove, she said that some hospitals were having to throw away vaccines.
“They come in vials of ten doses. After one’s been opened, it has to be used in a few hours,” Shannon said as she scooped a cookie, then plopped it onto a plate. “I have a friend who’s completely healthy, but she got a vaccine because she asked a hospital front desk if there were extras.” She pointed to me with the spatula. “Better than the trash.”
Upon returning to St. Louis, I decided I would call a few hospitals. If I ended up with a vaccine, great. If not, no big deal.
I dialed St. John’s Mercy Medical Center.
“Hi. I heard that if there are leftover vaccines, you throw them out. If that’s true, could I get one?”
There was a pause on the other end. “Um, this is the front desk. I’ll transfer you.”
Click — the phone rang. I crossed my legs and tapped a finger. There was a beep, then the line dropped. I frowned, then called Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
“Hi, my name is Jack, and I heard that you guys throw out vaccines at the end of the day?”
“No, we don’t do that.”
I tried to think of a reply. “Um ….” A few seconds passed.
“Have a nice day.” The woman hung up.
I sat there for a while, looking at the model kits my dad keeps near the ceiling — the Incredible Hulk wrestling with a dinosaur, Superman punching his way through a brick wall. Maybe calling wasn’t the best method.
The next day, I drove to Barnes. I suppose there are other hospitals I could’ve gone to (and I have a feeling rural hospitals are more likely to give you a leftover vaccine), but I’m more familiar with BJC, and I like the Central West End.
Having parked, I loitered near an Applebee’s, then Euclid Avenue, and perused the hospital signs. Where would Barnes keep its vaccines? Siteman Cancer Center? That seemed wrong. That was the building for advanced medicine. Were vaccines advanced medicine?
The parceling out of vaccines has been a confusing, haphazard operation across the country. No one seems to know where to go or what to do. In the vacuum of clear procedures, private citizens have started cobbling together shot-tracking Facebook groups and hastily coded websites to point people toward temporary bounties. Missouri’s rollout has been particularly clumsy, oversupplying rural areas and
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that there must be a lot of people vying for spots at the moment for the situation to be this fluid.
I shrugged and tried for a Friday slot, figuring all those, for sure, must be filled up. But to my shock, one went through. The site directed me to check my email for a QR code to bring to the fairgrounds, and when I saw that I’d received one my eyes popped out of my head as though I were a Looney Tunes character noticing a fellow Looney Tunes character’s sexy drag outfit. I promptly sent the scheduler link and verification code to my mom, and then called her immediately and told her to check her email. I sent the link to several friends in a group text as well, hoping as many of the people I care about as possible would be able to get in.
One friend I spoke with as I raced to the site said he’d been tipped off to this situation earlier in the day, but had no luck when he’d tried to secure an appointment. The only reason I’d gotten one, we agreed, is that someone must have canceled theirs. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would do that, but I was grateful.
“Keep trying,” I told my mom urgently over the phone. “Even if it looks like all the slots are full, somebody might cancel.”
As we approach the one-year mark of the coronavirus pandemic running and ruining the vast majority of our lives, many have begun to hit a wall. COVID fatigue is real, and as the health crisis has dragged on endlessly, some are giving up and throwing caution to the wind, unable or unwilling to keep up with ever-shifting safety guidelines, while others are spiraling further and further into the depths of insanity as the isolation and lack of stimulation chew through their brain cells likes worms through soil.
I’m in the latter camp. That might be because, in my case, quarantine life essentially started about three months earlier than it did for most.
On December 4, 2019, I was riding a moped home from a trip to the store when a driver traveling the opposite direction suddenly turned in front of me, lining me up right between his headlights and propelling me through the air in what became my first (and hopefully last) 40 mph front flip. After an ambulance ride to the ER, emergency surgery to repair my newly shattered hip and a five-day stay in the hospital, I was sent home to recuperate. I spent the beginning of 2020 using a wheelchair.
That period of time is a haze of painkillers and prone positions in front of the television, broken up only by biweekly physical therapy appointments. By early March, and still with considerable difficulty, I finally got to the point where I could get around with a cane, and I was excited to finally trek out into the world again.
We’re all painfully aware of the global events of March 2020 that happened next. And since my fiancée is a nurse at a local hospital — with the accompanying potential to bring any manner of illness home from work — I’ve been studiously and strictly following stayat-home guidelines ever since.
And so, in a sense, I can serve as something of a glimpse into the near future, to the level of desperate, intractable boredom that awaits at the fifteen-month mark of quarantine life. Insanity at these levels can even make a man believe the unbelievable, to dare to dream that it’d be possible to get a vaccine months ahead of schedule through sheer luck.
As I was waved into a line of cars by a National Guardsman at the Belle-Clair Fairgrounds & Expo Center, I felt that same sense of hope I’d felt when I’d healed up from my accident. Finally, after all this time, I’d be able to start actually living my life again, rather than sitting in limbo. Finally, I’d be able to drop my complicated COVID safety rituals that’d grown so tiresome over the last twelve months. Finally, things could go back to normal again!
I called my mom to see if she’d had any luck securing an appointment and was delighted to hear she had — she was scheduled for the following morning. My dad, meanwhile, had nabbed a Friday slot and was driving to the site now. My sister hadn’t been able to get one yet, but she was still trying.
I was ecstatic, but a bit confused. How’d my mom get a Saturday slot? I’d tried for one of those, and they were all taken. And how had my dad gotten an appointment for today? Are people really canceling their appointments in such great numbers? The long line of cars snaking all through this parking lot would seem to indicate that there was plenty of demand for the shot. So what gives?
I watched as members of the National Guard approached the six or so cars in front of me, armed with scanners and clipboards. Then, with some confusion, I watched as they sent all six of those cars along in a batch, with none of them stopping in the area wherein the shots would presumably be administered.
At last, it was my turn. I pulled to the front, where a guardsman asked for my QR code and ID. After scanning the former, he looked at the latter.
“OK, two problems,” he said. “First, you don’t live in Illinois. Second, you’re not 65.”
I told him that I’d heard they had more shots than they had appointments, and that supposedly they’d opened up eligibility to the general public.
“They changed the rules at noon,” he told me. “I just got here.”
I asked if there was anything I could do here, and he said no. So I took my ID back, told the man “thank you” and then pulled my car forward until I was no longer in anyone’s way, whereupon I rolled my window back up, gripped my steering wheel with both hands and screamed at the top of my lungs in frustration.
After collecting myself, I called
Unknown numbers of people booked appointments to get vaccines at Belle-Clair Fairgrounds only to be turned away and called cheaters. | JACK KILLEEN
Sure, maybe it was an insane fantasy to think that a mass vaccination event would see so little public interest that it would open up to the public regardless of eligibility, but if I filled out all of my information honestly, what the hell did I do wrong?
my dad. “Turn around,” I told him. He explained to me that my mom and sister had just jumped into my mom’s car and were on their way to the site now too — my sister had gotten a late-Friday appointment just like he and I had.
That’s when it dawned on me: The canceled visits were the people who were being turned away for not qualifying — that’s why there were so many, and the situation felt so fluid. The slot my sister had secured was probably originally held by the occupant of one of the six cars that had been in front of me. The system that St. Clair County had used for scheduling these appointments bafflingly didn’t exclude people who were not qualified, even when those people were 100 percent forthright about their Missouri citizenship and younger age. So with every car that was turned away a new appointment opened up, which then got gobbled up by someone else who probably wasn’t qualified but who was repeatedly hitting refresh on the scheduler link. Essentially, it was a self-feeding system guaranteeing that the event would be run in the least efficient manner humanly possible, as the poor National Guard members were forced to spend the majority of their time sending people away instead of helping to administer shots.
“Yeah, turn around,” I told my dad. “Call Mom and tell her to do the same.”
As the visions of hugging my family members for the first time in a year evaporated before my eyes, I dejectedly pointed my car in the direction of home, vowing to never get my hopes up again.
The following morning, I was irate to wake to news that I’d been labeled a cheater.
As reported by Kavahn Mansouri (a former RFT intern) for the Belleville NewsDemocrat, St. Clair County Board Chairman Mark Kern said that a whopping 80 percent of Friday’s scheduled appointments had been nabbed by people who were not eligible. All that talk of extra shots and open eligibility had been nothing more than a myth. The explanation the guardsman had given me about the rules changing at noon and his having just arrived was untrue and, most likely, simply the best way they had figured out to keep the line moving and get the ineligible people to leave with as little resistance as possible. That’s understandable, and more power to them.
Vaccine chasers from as far as California had shown up to the event, according to Kern, as well as many from Missouri and some from Michigan. They were all turned away.
“Someone figured out how to get through the system and make it hard for people who legitimately need the vaccine, who live here, to sign up,” Kern said. “... Someone or a group of people really hurt the system by trying to cheat and get around the rules as they exist.”
Herb Simmons, the county emergency management agency director, referred to the problem as a “breach” in the appointment system. Officials believe the link — the same link I’d used — was shared and reshared on social media and through text messages to the point of virality, resulting in that Friday’s clusterfuck. Simmons said entire families were showing up for vaccinations, and even a twelve-year-old had arrived with an appointment.
“Anytime someone who hasn’t followed the rule has to be turned away, that slows the process down,” Simmons said. “Please be from St. Clair County, and we will get you taken care of as quickly
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undersupplying St. Louis and Kansas City. Every day brings more accounts of urbanites with the ability and resources scurrying across the state in search of doses.
In the background are questions of the morality of the system as debates rage about who gets vaccinated and when. Missouri Governor Mike Parson infuriated educators when he initially refused to prioritize teachers, even as he pushed to open schools. He has also admitted there are “vaccine deserts” in parts of the cities — an inequality that has hit primarily Black and brown neighborhoods especially hard.
It’s clear that the state has done a poor job getting shots to those who need them most. But what is the morality of letting shots go to waste? I’m young and healthy, and that understandably places me at the lowest priority in the state’s tiered system. Am I jumping the line if excess shots are available and would otherwise go to waste? Maybe it’s as simple as what Shannon said: “Better than the trash can.”
At Barnes, I walked through the doorway into a big lobby. The ceilings were high above clean hardwood floors. People lounged in leather chairs. Poles with retractable straps (the kind school cafeterias use) created a single lane leading from the entrance to a plastic foldout table. Behind the table sat two women, nearly identical, who wore face guards over their masks. In order to enter the building, you had to first approach the women.
I walked up. One of them peered down at a piece of paper and said, “Have you had any symptoms of COVID-19? Have you been in contact with anyone who has tested positive in the past fourteen days? Have you experienced any symptoms of COVID-19, including loss of taste, smell ….” After she finished, I said, “No.” She peeled a sticker off a roll and handed it to me. There was a “2” written on it. The other stickers had 2s too.
“Actually, I had a question about vaccines,” I said as I placed the sticker on my jeans. “Is this where you give vaccines?”
“Oh.” She pointed to her left. “Talk to him.”
A man sat behind a desk. He was thin, wearing a gray suit and bent over paperwork.
“Hi. I have some questions about vaccines.”
“We have a website for that.” He opened a laptop. “I can give you the link.”
Internally, I sighed. I knew the website he was talking about, and it wouldn’t help.
“Actually, I’m a reporter.”
“You are? I used to be a reporter. Jeffrey Small for Channel 5.” He squinted. “You know, you should be going through media relations.”
Media relations. I already knew that was a dead end. Phone calls with people in tinny voices.
“Oh. Technically, I’m an intern. This is my second week.”
“I see. You like it?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good. I’ll give you their number.” He tore a sheet of paper off a notepad, then paused. “Who are you with again?”
“The Riverfront Times.”
He nodded, then began writing.
We talked a little more before he handed me a note and I walked out of the hospital.
A few days passed, and Small’s note remained untouched on my desk. This didn’t matter, because I got a text from my sister:
“Just an FYI if anyone is interested.... The Belleville Fairgrounds are doing a drive thru covid vaccine event tomorrowthis weekend and need people to sign up so the vaccines don’t go to waste.”
Her text included a long, randomlooking website and an eight-character registration code.
“It says it was for people over 75 and healthcare workers only, but they didn’t have enough people under this category registered and they’ve opened it to the public.”
My sister added, “A friend sent this!”
I followed the link and began filling in information. No way this works, I thought. I hit submit. “Registration complete,” the page said. My appointment was in two days. I jumped around the house, still holding my phone. It seemed I’d found my scenario.
If the past year has taught me anything, it’s to always leave room for disappointment. I graduated college without a proper goodbye. I spent my summer at home rather than a summer camp (I had plans to be a counselor). A lot of friends lost their post-graduation jobs, and most of them live with their parents, as do I.
This vaccine proved to be no different. The day before my appointment, I got a call from the St. Clair County health clinic. I wasn’t eligible, I shouldn’t have gotten the link, and if I showed up I’d be turned away. I was disappointed, but not sorrowfully so.
That night, I met some friends at a county rec center to play basketball. (As Washington University students, these friends get saliva tested weekly, and I hardly leave the house, so we figured the risk of catching or spreading the virus was low.) It was 8 p.m. and cold. Ours were the only cars in the parking lot. As we shuffled one by one past the front desk, a woman measured the temperatures on our wrists. She nodded silently until each of us was through. It felt like we were entering a speak-easy.
Later, A— and I sat courtside watching
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as possible.”
The fact that I and those like me were being scapegoated as cheaters who refused to follow the rules by the people in charge of this horribly mismanaged system left me incensed. ow difficult would it be to simply code the appointment scheduler to exclude people who should be excluded? How much time and effort would have been saved if this had just been done right in the first place? Sure, maybe it was an insane fantasy to think that a mass vaccination event would see so little interest from people in proper tiers that it would open up to the public regardless of eligibility, but if I filled out all of my information honestly, what the hell did I do wrong?
I decided to see what I could learn about these people. A quick Google search on Simmons’ name pulled up a trove of October reports in which Simmons can be seen in multiple videos unmasked and ignoring social distancing guidelines in his capacity as commissioner of the Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling organi ation, which he recently moved to Tennessee in order to skirt — some might even say “cheat” — COVID-1 guidelines. This, even as he repeatedly stressed the importance of the safety measures to St. Clair County residents.
Asked by Fox 2 reporter Chris ayes why it’s O for him to ignore those rules in Tennessee but enforce them in Illinois, he dropped this gem: “I have no idea. I guess because their mitigation is different. Each state has their own guidelines that they’re going by. Each county down there is probably — is different — than what it is here.” ern, meanwhile, opted to stand by his man. Despite the fact that Simmons can plainly be seen flouting his own guidance in multiple videos, ern, who said he didn’t watch any of them, told SD that Simmons had actually not done that.
“Mr. Simmons wears a mask and practices social distancing,” ern said. “ e does everything he’s supposed to do.”
St. Clair County residents were incensed at the videos. Freeburg Village Administrator Tony Funderburg offered withering criticism when contacted by SD .
“When I first saw it, I’m like, There’s no way this guy can do this job, there’s just no way,’” Funderburg said. “ e’s the guy that’s telling us how to live our lives and
St. Clair County o cials blamed people who thought they had legitimate appointments, instead of the failures in their system. | JACK KILLEEN
what to do on a daily basis, and he is not following that. It’s hard for me to have any respect for him at this point.”
Meanwhile, as I was watching videos of a maskless Simmons hanging out with wrestlers, my colleague illeen was back on the scene in St. Clair County, where he came across Simmons while reporting. When illeen asked about the debacle, Simmons responded with a bunch of bullshit.
“It was people that had got a link sent to them by a friend or family member that clearly stated that if you didn’t receive this from the health department you shouldn’t sign up, and they did,” he said falsely — there was no such message on the page. illeen asked how so many people were able to sign up despite being ineligible, to which Simmons replied, “Because they probably went in there and changed, they put different, false dates and that in there,” which is not true of my case, illeen’s, my family’s or many others at the site who filled out the questionnaire honestly.
“At the top of the QR code it says that you have to be a frontline health-care worker or 75 or older,” a man near Simmons said, to Simmons’ approval. This is also not the case at all whatsoever.
Asked the most burning question, the one that would have avoided this entire stupid mess — why the system didn’t automatically exclude people who were not eligible — Simmons opted to pass the buck.
“It’s the software that they use,” he said. “We don’t have any control of that.”
Nearly two weeks later, as I was sitting down and working on this story, I got a message from a friend: There was a mass vaccination event happening in Leopold, Missouri, that had not seen many people signing up for appointments, I was told. Due to the dearth of willing recipients, the event was to be opened to the public at large regardless of eligibility. According to FVS reporter Alayna Chapie, the site was stocked with 1, 50 shots, but Leopold, whose population is a scant 65 people, apparently didn’t need that many.
I was skeptical. This scenario sounded eerily familiar, and my
St. Clair County experience had already seared the life lesson to never get my hopes up onto my very being. But though my brain did protest, I soon found my body behind the wheel of my car, headed two and a half hours south with my fingers crossed. At the very least I could see some cows,
I figured. Spotty cell service and a lack of confirmation from the workers manning the Missouri Department of ealth and Senior
Services COVID-1 hotline prevented me from reaching out to friends and family as I had done before. This mass vax event was more than double the distance I’d driven for my last failed attempt, and even if I could get cell service long enough to relay a message, I wouldn’t want to send anyone on what was, more likely than not, another utterly doomed wild goose chase.
Several refrains of “Moo, cows, eat up some hay” (to the tune of the Ludacris song) later I arrived at a nights of Columbus hall in the tiny town. Its parking lot was overflowing with cars, and a National Guardsman again directed me to the line.
When I was asked for my ID, I handed it over, fully prepared to be turned away at this point just as I had before.
“You’re from St. Louis?” the guardsman who took it said.
“County, yeah,” I replied.
“ ey, I’m from Florissant,” he said as he handed my license back to me, along with a vaccine card.
It seemed as though the rumors that brought me here were true, but I wanted to be sure, so I asked the guardsman why, exactly, the event had been opened to the public.
“We only had about 00 people sign up,” he told me. “So they went ahead and blasted it out to the media that anyone could come.” Minutes later, a woman in scrubs came to my door with a syringe in hand, filled with that magical life-restoring fluid, and stuck me right in the arm, to my absolute shock and infinite gratitude.
The following day — the time of this writing — I could find ero reports of elected or appointed Missouri officials accusing me of cheating. n
Hundreds of people flocked to the Belle-Clair fairgrounds for vaccines during a weekend event in February. St. Clair o cials say no doses were wasted. | JACK KILLEEN
KILLEEN
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the game. Our heads followed the ball as it traveled from one hoop to the other. Shoes squeaked like many birds whistling.
“I feel less bad about doing this now that people are getting vaccinated,” A— said.
“People are getting vaccinated?” I said.
“J— did the other week. R— has been for at least a month.”
“How?”
“It’s a little sketch. J—’s mom hooked him up. I don’t know how. R— was volunteering at a vaccine drive, though, and at the end of the day they had extras.”
I sighed. R—, short and strong, drove through the lane and made a lay-up.
“Dang.”
On Sunday, February 14, despite not having an appointment, I decided to drive to the Belle-Clair Fairgrounds & Expo Center in Belleville, Illinois. I would ask a few questions for my story, see what a vaccine drive looked like and ask if they had extras. There was a snowstorm forecasted to begin in a few hours, so I threw a shovel in the trunk. It was 9 degrees. On the way, I passed a burning car. Black smoke curled into the sky.
The Belle-Clair Fairgrounds & Expo Center is a huge parking lot surrounded by a fence. Above the top rail runs three rows of barbed wire. Across the street is a McDonald’s. That day, there was a layer of old snow over everything. Guarding the entrance were two police cars and a sign that said, “COVID 19 VACCINE SITE / BY APPT ONLY.”
When I turned inside the lot, a man in a beige jumpsuit stepped forward and began pointing at my car, then a lane made of cones and caution tape. I rolled down my window and said I was a reporter and I had some questions.
“A reporter?”
I confirmed. He mumbled into a walkie talkie on his shoulder. Then he lifted the caution tape for my car to crawl under. I parked on the snow and got out to take pictures.
“Who are you with again?” he yelled from a distance.
“The Riverfront Times!”
“Riverfront Time,” he murmured into his shoulder.
A little while later, a white Ford Escape approached. I got back in my car. The Ford stopped with its driver-side door across from mine. The window rolled down.
“You the reporter?”
He introduced himself as Herb Simmons, the St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency director. He had thin white hair and rectangular glasses. In the passenger seat was another man, maskless, who tapped at his phone.
I told Simmons I was there about the ineligible registrations, and he eased into a speech. I grabbed my phone, hit record and held it out the window, but soon I realized I wasn’t wearing gloves. I devised a system: When one hand held the phone, the other warmed against my breath. Simmons told me how well things were going. I switched hands. There were hiccups with all the ineligible people
showing up on Friday, but now that was over. They’d had to turn away a lot of people — how many they weren’t sure. A breeze picked up. I eyed the gloves, which lay mockingly in the seat next to me, and calculated how I could put them on without dropping the phone. Would it balance on the door?
Simmons and I continued like this, a follow-up question here and there, until it seemed he had said all he wanted to.
“One last thing,” I said. “Have you had to throw away any vaccines?”
“No. No vaccines have gone to waste.”
Trying not to seem disappointed, I nodded. I set the phone aside, rubbed my hands, then sat on them. Simmons offered to show me around the place, and I said sure, why not?
For the next half hour, Simmons was Virgil and I was Dante. I saw the entrails of a mass vaccination site. My favorite part was a big metal shed with three sections labeled “Cows,” “Swine” and “Sheep.” This had nothing to do with the vaccination process; I just enjoyed the commitment to labeling.
After I waved goodbye to Simmons and his friend, I rolled up my window and turned the heat as high as it went. Despite the setbacks, I was confident I would find my vaccine scenario someday. I left the fairgrounds hoping to be home before the storm arrived.
On a recent Tuesday, the first warm day in months, I went to the park to play basketball. I didn’t stay long, though. The courts were all taken. I had gotten there early, as did one other friend, so we texted the group. The others quickly made plans for Three Kings happy hour or Forest Park.
As I got up to leave, I noticed the friend was putting on his shoes.
“You staying?”
“Yeah, I think I’ll play with those guys. They’re grad students, and I’ve played with them before.”
“You’re not worried about the virus?”
“No,” he said. “Got vaccinated last week.”
“How?”
“I work at a hospital, and they had extras.”
“Do they ever have extras still?”
“Sometimes, but they only give them to employees.” He stood.
“Well, if they’re ever about to throw any out ….”
“Yeah, I’ll let you know.” Then he jogged off towards the court. n
