Better Than the Alternative

I finally got my updated Covid-19 vaccination yesterday.

My previous shot was just, oh, the month before yesterday. Maybe. I don’t remember.

It turns out I was playing roulette. You recall those paper cards we all carried around back in the dark ages? The ones that listed all our shot information? That we had to present to the bouncer at the theater door in order to get in? Well, I found mine towards the middle of the accumulated rubbish in my wallet, and my last booster was in November 2022. Oops.

They don’t update those handy little cards anymore. So I will definitely be in trouble two years from now when I speculate that my last booster was the month before yesterday.

A lot has changed over that time frame, and a lot has stayed the same. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has continued to throw off variants at a dizzying rate. The current vaccines are broadly designed for Omicron variants like May’s JN.1 and June’s KP.2. The current newbie on the scene is XEC, which is the proposed name for a hybrid of the Omicron lineages KS.1.1 and KP.3.3. That’s roughly good news, since the current vaccine should help out for a while. Probably just not until the month before yesterday.

We no longer stand in long lines, 6 feet apart, to spit into tubes and wait for PCR results to come back in a day or two. This sort of official reporting has more or less been replaced by wastewater monitoring. Here’ the current trend from the CDC:

(Different colored lines represent different regions of the country. They’re all pretty similar for our purposes. Check out the link if you’re interested. )

So I was clearly whistling past the grave yard this summer. Fortunately, transmission is back down to low levels here in Charlottesville right now. But nevertheless, we’ve noticed that a lot of service workers have been ordered back to masks by their employers. Customers are still unmasked, whistling Gregorian chants along with me, mind you, but bosses increasingly seem to want to protect their investment in the folks at the cash registers.

In our area, the Moderna vaccine has faded away, leaving Pfizer as the only choice. My pharmacist said they tried hard to get the Moderna offering but were unsuccessful and finally just gave up. I’ve been a Pfizer conscript all along, so I guess I’m not too bothered by it. Left arm in, it was.

When I asked the pharmacist how people were tolerating the new vaccine, she said there was no big change from previous vaccines. Some soreness at the site of injection, yada, yada, yada. But most recipients were just fine.

I’m happy for them. It hit me like a ton of bricks. About 11 PM, my arm exploded and fell off. I developed a raging fever without any actual increase in temperature. The tips of my toes were sending shooting pain back and forth between them in a Morse code known only to them. I slept between two sheets of 60 grit carborundum. A tendon in my neck snaked up through my ear, grabbed the nearest optic nerve and started pulling on its attached eyeball. There’s something like 360 joints in the human body and every one of mine rushed to pronounce itself inflamed. And probably some new joints not yet known to science. My walk was so pained it made Uncle Joe, by comparison, seem to move like a New World Mikhail Baryshnikov. Thirty six hours post jab, and a generous schedule of ibuprofen later, things are easing up a little.

Which is too bad. The agony of that general immunity reaction had occupied my full attention and distracted me from the constant twiddling of Trump Worry Beads between thumb and index finger. Now I have to get back to facing real existential anxiety again.