Twice-dosed in Canada: vaccination and the middle way

Things are changing, even here in slow-poke Canada. Vaccines are everywhere. Pop-ups, pop-ins, walk ups, walk ins. As long as we all come out jabbed, it's okay with me. I watched the shenanigans in the US as people jumped through loopholes to get vaccinated sooner, and saw the orderly queuing in the UK, and I wondered in which camp Canada would fall when we finally got our act together and scored some vaccines. It turns out, as perhaps I ought to have guessed, to be in-between. There was order--sign up, get called or texted or emailed for your appointment--and there were loopholes: an app called VaccineHuntersCanada tweeted prolifically about which mosque or racetrack or school had a clinic with extra doses today, now, hurry! Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Just jump in the car (if you have one), roll up your sleeve and get jabbed.

Our family served as a fair representation of the country as a whole, I feel. Some of us signed up and awaited the call while for others, it became a more active process of hide and seek. "Why is trying to get vaccinated in Ontario like playing a game of whack-a-mole?' someone tweeted bitterly. "Vaccination program is being run as a scavenger hunt!"said another critic. "If you elect a scavenger, expect a hunt," came one tart reply from a non-supporter of Ontario's under-educated, over-blustery, conservative, confused leader, Doug Ford. 

Eventually, all five of us--four in Toronto, one in Vancouver--got first doses, and we breathed a little easier. Then, ahead of schedule, I was offered my second dose of AstraZeneca. It came ten days too early for an ideal immune response, but a batch of the stuff was expiring and we who might were abjured to turn up. So I took one for the team, baring my arm womanfully even after the pharmacist acknowledged that doing so would, according to the current research, reduce my protection against covid-19 by 10%. I asked the pharmacist whether she herself would, in my place, accept a dose of AZ 10 days early and she said, ominously, that yes she would because who knew what next week would bring in terms of supply or availability. So I went ahead, on the philosophy of a bird in the hand (or a needle in an arm) etc. I can only hope that next week brings new findings that say that I am in fact as well protected as the next twice-dosed human being. 

So, big changes: fourteen days after my jab, I will be considered fully vaccinated. A positive vista of possibilities opens up. I am thinking like Wendy in Peter Pan and wondering whether I too might be able to fly.