Guilt? We have no time for it.
While the rest of the world struggles to obtain vaccinations, the United States has launched a massive campaign to get shots into everyone in the next few months. There are very few advantages to living in a broken state but when it’s also the richest country in the world, its greed and rapaciousness allows it to effectively hijack millions of doses for its own: it’s becoming easier to be vaccinated if you live in this country.
“Easier” doesn’t mean that it’s actually easy, at all. At least in Illinois, you have to either get up at some ungodly hour to make sure you can snag an appointment or have some kind soul do that for you. And bizarrely, there are few attempts to get the message out to the public. Here in Chicago, a dense, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial city, I keep expecting to see PSAs everywhere in several languages and information and signup kiosks where people can get information: they don’t exist. The system, such as it is, is inefficient and haphazard: until the day I got my appointment (thanks to the kindness of friends who stepped up to help me), I didn’t even know that Walgreens had begun giving out vaccinations. The information on the government’s website seems always a week behind, and I had to resort to publicly asking for help on social media. I have access to the internet, I’ve been following the news fairly well, I keep up on government-issued information, I’m able to navigate dense networks of information, I have a wide network of friends of supporters—and I still had such a hard time that I almost dissolved in tears at one point. What do people without those advantages, especially the elderly living alone and the undocumented, do to get the information they need?
My friend Daniel Lipson theorises that the reason for all the chaos is that it allows for grift, something Chicago in particular is famous for, alas. And grift there is, in abundance. One of the most outrageous stories is that of Loretto Hospital holding a vaccination event for the very wealthy friends of its chief officers at the Gold Coast luxury watch store Geneva Seal. The actual hospital is based in Austin, a historically underserved community on the west side of the city and nowhere near the store. The vaccinations were meant for a neighbourhood already suffering the unequal and racialised effects of COVID but, instead, went to wealthy and mostly white Chicagoans who were not even eligible under the rules of distribution set up by the state (at the time, March 3, only those 65 and older and frontline workers were to get vaccinated). The incoherence of the system is a feature, not a bug: it’s deliberately set up to enable the passing of favours among the city’s elite.
All of this creates an atmosphere of suspicion and, it seems, a pervasive nosiness about how people might have received vaccinations. If you seem “young and healthy,” it seems, people feel free to probe and demand to know why you were able to get vaccinated. As my friend and comrade Claudia Stellar pointed out on Twitter, you never know what people’s underlying health conditions are—and it’s really none of your business.
Besides suspicion, though, there’s also a sense of guilt I’m sensing among friends, and that’s understandable. Not only are many in this country still struggling to find vaccinations, but the entire planet, including even Canada with its superior healthcare system is suffering from a severe lack. My advice to anyone struggling with guilt: be aware of the tremendous inequality that we see everywhere with respect to COVID vaccinations but if you have a chance, get the shot. Obviously, don’t be an arsehole in going about it: don’t, for instance, be that Gold Coaster taking a shot from a hospital you know is supposed to give it to people already disenfranchised and dying in droves. Don’t be like those jerks, Rod and Ekaterina Baker, a wealthy Vancouver couple who flew to Beaver Creek, Alaska to get vaccinations while pretending to be local motel workers.
Should you eschew your shot because you think you can get yours down the line after a time of scarcity, don’t be smug about it and pretend that you’re somehow enabling some other person to get one. Because, really, this isn’t a one-to-one formulation: the universe is not playing some board game with vaccinations and placing your untaken shot in the arm of another. If you decide to not get a shot, don’t, and shut up about it instead of turning it into a tale about your glory.
If you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who can get you a shot, check to make sure it’s not a situation like the kind in the Gold Coast or Alaska. At this point, that seems much less likely, but you should check and if, for instance, you’re getting a shot because a clinic has too many and needs to dispense its remainders quickly, take the shot (the wealthiest country in the world has the highest death rate and has been throwing out excess vaccinations: yes, this fact breaks all our brains). Just get that damn shot. Don’t post pictures of your vaccination card.
And once you do get vaccinated, please remember: vaccinations don’t make you immune, and there are too many deadly variants floating around and/or on the horizon, so keep masking and distancing. In Chicago, I can already see people walking around maskless. On the predominantly white north side, life never really changed much and people have been carelessly strolling around without masks as if nothing ever changed. Gay white men, the powerbrokers in this city, are apparently already gathering on the beaches, mostly unmasked and eager to resume Pride in June (a sweaty, hot superspreader event). We have a Black, lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, who loves policing and surveilling communities of colour and scolding them for not caring about their mamas, to appease the gay white men who put her in power. We’re going to see massive waves of infections that will spread from the north side to the already vulnerable south and west sides—with all the blame being placed on Black and brown shoulders.
Guilt? We have no time for it. Instead, get your shot and keep fighting the city and state forces that make getting information and vaccinations so difficult. Fight the unequal forces of surveillance and punishment that allow cops to harass Black and brown people for gathering even when masked while letting white people roam around as if we were still in 2019. Fight for free healthcare for all, and fight to end the inequality of resources that has left the rest of the world still exhausted and struggling to get vaccines.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: The Doctor, Samuel Luke Fildes, 1891.