3 minute read
BULLY PULPIT
life beyond wheels
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By Ian Ruder
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VACCINE QUEST
In the crazy times we live in, I mistakenly thought figuring out when I’d be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine would be easy. Federal and state leaders and experts have been talking about the vaccine rollout for months. After almost a year of masks and isolation, getting vaccinated is the number one thing on pretty much everyone’s mind. Determining when I would be eligible and how and where I’d need to go didn’t seem like too big of an ask. I should have known better.
Let me preface this by saying I had no expectation of receiving a vaccine quickly. While I am a quad and a wheelchair user, I’m healthy and in good shape. I’m not over 65. I’m not immunocompromised, and I’m not an essential worker. There are a lot of people who need vaccines before I get one, and I’m fine waiting. Additionally, vaccinating tens of millions of people is an unprecedented and overwhelming task, and based on the way our government has struggled to respond to the virus to date, I wasn’t getting my hopes up for a miraculously speedy rollout.
All I wanted was some certainty — a sense that there was a clear plan and an understanding of how I fit in it. Certainty has been hard to come by in the pandemic era and its absence has taken a toll on our mental health. Many of us have made all the recommended sacrifices and endured the accompanying hardships with the knowledge that there are no guarantees when it comes to getting COVID-19. You can do everything “right” and get sick, and you can do everything “wrong” and stay healthy. Even more frustrating, there’s no way to predict how your body will respond should you get sick, with many people experiencing few to no symptoms while others see their lives destroyed.
So yeah, being able to lock in a date and a plan for getting the vaccine and finally knowing when this stage will be over would be a nice change. Unfortunately, a month into the rollout, this still feels like a distant fantasy.
I started my quest for certainty on the website Oregon built to answer all COVIDrelated issues. I naively assumed there would be an infographic or chart that clarified the state’s classification system and where I fit in it. Instead, I ended up trudging through a multi-page FAQ full of footnotes and obfuscations that left me even more confused than when I started.
You can imagine my relief when I noticed a small pop-up icon that identified itself as the “Vaccine Information Tool” and promised
to help me determine when I could get a vaccine. Unfortunately, as soon as I answered the two questions it asked, it immediately blurted out that I am not currently eligible. That I got the same result no matter what answers I gave to the questions made me think it might not be the best guide.
Everything on the website reenforced a sad truism that we as disabled people know all too well: Our own government doesn’t understand us, and its ignorance often ends up directly harming us. Each state has its own plan, and I’ve seen some states handling the vaccine more efficiently, but more often I’ve heard of friends and other wheelchair users facing the same confusion and frustration I have.
While I did get a small laugh out of the Vaccine Information Tool’s ineptitude, the vaccine rollout is no laughing matter. Over 400,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19, and if we don’t start to get our act together, a lot more will follow for no good reason.
