LAST EDITED ON Mar-15-21 AT 03:28 AM (EDT)
 
A few months ago, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published guidelines for the order in which persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as vaccine production came online. If you live in the US, you may remember them. It was this complicated tier system that involved multiple Tiers 1 for some weird reason. If memory serves, Tier 1A was medical workers and the very old, and Tier 1B was to be the slightly less very old plus the younger people at greatest risk of developing life-threatening complications if they catch the virus. Tier 1B was to be vaccinated in February and early March. Based on my laundry list of comorbidities, I was told by my neurologist and my primary care provider that I would surely be in that cohort.

In late February, not yet having gotten around to Tier 1B, the health authorities here in Maine changed course and scrapped the federal system entirely. Instead, Maine Public Health decreed that vaccination would be scheduled strictly on the basis of age, with each month earmarked for a particular decade. February having retroactively been for persons 70+, that makes this month reserved for those over 60.

If you're keeping score at home, that knocks me from "should've been done last month" to sometime in the middle of May, and means that high-risk Mainers in their twenties have to hold out until July.

I am livid about this, for a bunch of reasons. For one, this is the second time the public health authorities here in the great State of Maine have left me for dead. (The first was when then-Governor LePage dumped an entire demographic I happened to be in off of MaineCare, not that long after my MS diagnosis.) For another, there's the bait-and-switch aspect. Being told "no worries, hang on until February and we've got you" and then having that arbitrarily rescinded is doing bad shit to my headspace.

But even if I wasn't personally affected on such a profound level, I think I'd still be pretty pissed about it, because denying vaccination against a life-threatening disease to high-risk people just because of their age is blatant abandonment of the disabled in a time of public emergency. More than that, since the most deeply affected are of childbearing age, let's not mince words here, it's fucking eugenics.

The fact that they tout it on the state CDC's website as a more equitable method of distribution than the federal guidelines is just the cherry on top.

At this point I don't just regret coming back to this state, I regret having been born here.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.