The COVID-19 vaccine is killing me.
My ears are buzzing from high blood pressure and my breathing is obstructed. But these are not side effects. We know the vaccines are safe and effective.
It’s frustration – and some dizziness.
I’m as risky as almost anyone, but as far as I can tell with any clarity, I haven’t given a chance yet. At least not in Alabama, where about half a million people have had it before me.
It feels pretty much guaranteed that a case of COVID-19 would kill me. I’m middle-aged – in my 50s – but in my late 30s I was diagnosed with genetic emphysema. A missing chemical compound called Alpha-1 Antitrypsin caused my immune system to gradually destroy the elasticity of my lungs. My breathing capacity is less than a fifth of what it should be for someone my age.
I went from an active life – commuting by bike, walking and running with my dog - to breathe in just a few years. That’s why I stopped working in the smoke and heat of restaurant kitchens and started writing for a living.
It’s also why I sleep and exercise with a stream of oxygen running into my nose – why even a cold or hay fever causes bronchitis and then pneumonia. It has resulted in more than half a dozen hospitalizations in the past 16 years.
My first hospital stay cost $ 8,000 for four days, all because of missing a pharmaceutical dose. I have since qualified for disability and accompanying Medicare coverage; otherwise, I wouldn’t have insurance at all, or access the nearly $ 250,000 in drugs I need to stay alive each year.
When a “strange new pneumonia” showed up over a year ago, it clearly caught my attention. In March 2020, COVID-19 seeped through the United States and my doctors told me to quarantine at home and take all safety precautions.
Breakthroughs in vaccines have come astonishingly fast, and Alabama’s staged rollout began in December, with first-line workers and group housing residents. Understandable and fair.
Last month, some facilities transitioned to Phase 1b – people over 75, first responders, essential workers dealing with the public. Interested parties were directed to websites or telephone numbers for registration.
Around this time, a social media parade came as younger, healthier faces announced their vaccinations. My wife cooked every other day.
‘How did they get this? Why don’t you get that? she cried.
We found some lawyers were eligible – or at least we heard they got shots. There are 18,000 members of the Alabama Bar Association, two-thirds men, about 90 percent white. Librarians, publicists, city hall employees and others were also vaccinated.
As far as I am concerned, some websites did not have a specific list of media personnel (my profession) or pre-existing eligibility conditions. I registered anyway, but never heard back.
Rumors circulated of facilities opening intermittently on a first-come, first-served, and without restrictions. I have never received a notification.
Conditions tightened. A clinic’s website has been closed. Another announced critical shortages. A phone number for another gave only a message that the vaccine was gone.
This shoddy scenario ruled the state. Like the Wall Street Journal reported recently, we were the last in the country to have vaccinations, with only 10,013 per 100,000 residents. All while, according to Johns Hopkins University, we had one of the highest rates of positive coronavirus tests with 29 percent in recent weeks.
The causes are obvious: Alabama is largely poor, rural and unhealthy. When the state turned down Medicaid expansion for Obamacare, it highlighted an overloaded public health system that is causing access to nationwide health care to evaporate. In February 2020, a quarter of Alabama hospitals were threatened with closure.
Latent paranoia caused by historical racism and gruesome experiments with black populations makes some here understandably – albeit unfortunately – suspicious of vaccinations. Black people make up 27 percent of Alabama’s population – the state’s most impoverished rural counties are predominantly black – but only 11 percent of those vaccinated are black, according to a recent estimate.
The wider politicization of COVID-19 and paranoid beliefs also play a role. That’s why only a quarter of the Mobile, Alabama police force had been vaccinated at the beginning of this month. Add to that the confused communication I encountered, and the results become inevitable.
Some of those police officers worked last Tuesday on Mobile’s massive Mardi Gras street party, a potential superspreader event chaired by Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson after lawmakers passed a law protecting businesses and governments from COVID-19 lawsuits. The expected turnout of thousands was dampened by cold temperatures and warnings from public health officials. It could be a savior.
State health official Dr. Scott Harris admitted that the vaccine stock is low and, combined with the above factors, it is a headache. He said the Biden government has straightened out the growls, but it’s not enough.
‘We are not healthy to begin with. We have a lot of diabetes and heart disease and other things that predispose people to bad health problems, ”Harris recently told reporters. “Adding that category of chronic disease could add perhaps two million people to the list. It is not helpful to say that everyone is immediately eligible if there is no vaccine to give them. “
Despite Harris’s statement, there are still mixed signals on the street. A restaurant employee told me that he arrived at Mobile’s largest clinic on February 13 and – without being asked for proof of identity ‘or anything’ – was given a chance. His wife with diabetes was also given the needle, he said.
Walmart announced the distribution of vaccines earlier this month. On the website, I referred to myself as an essential employee – as a media worker – rather than a high-risk person. Ironically, if I carry portable oxygen, my wife can hitch a ride as “living with a high-risk person,” although it seems as if the “high-risk” patient would still be in a later vaccine group.
I don’t know the source of all these gaps in the protocol, between official schedules and what’s happening. We are tired of worrying about it. We’ve tried to stick to the rules, but we’re tired of playing with my life.
Three days before our scheduled vaccination appointments, I woke up with my very first bout of dizziness. The disruption of the inner ear made me weaken and retch to rule out my vaccination, as it would now be impossible to distinguish vertigo from possible side effects of vaccination.
A visit to a medical specialist takes precedence over the vaccination – assuming I could have gotten it at all. The week until then will be fraught with questions about the local spread of COVID-19. Was Mardi Gras enough to fill the specialist’s office with the deadly virus? Shall I roll into the waiting room to seek relief, only to find my doom?
The only certainty is that if I find relief from the vertigo specialist that day, we’ll go straight to Mobile’s largest vaccine clinic, where more and more stories of ignored priorities, appointments, and protocols pop up.
Our patience and choices have been exhausted, and I need that opportunity.