Time-sensitive: You can get vaccinated in Maryland NOW (even if you live in DC or Virginia)
So It Turns Out, #27
Hi all,
Another special emergency issue1 of So It Turns Out, as unexpectedly Governor Hogan of Maryland announced today that all Maryland mass vaccination supersites will begin vaccinating individuals of all ages tomorrow, with pharmacies and other locations following the week later.
(As this newsletter was going to press, DC announced that it will go to open season on April 19.2 I’ll send advice on that at a later date once more is clear, but if you’re based in DC, you should follow this advice, but also pre-register for vaccinations in DC if you (somehow) haven’t already here. )
Why this matters to you, even if you live in DC or Virginia:
Crucially, Maryland will vaccinate non-residents, as an explicit policy choice. You can get vaccinated in Maryland even if you live in DC, or Virginia, or Delaware, or wherever.
Let me say that again: non-residents will not be turned away from Maryland vaccine sites.3 And I believe that’s fair and equitable, since DC has given over 75,000 doses of vaccine to non-residents (mainly MD and VA); I salute Maryland for choosing to reciprocate accordingly.
Over the past week, Maryland has been calling DC residents who have preregistered for vaccinations to schedule appointments, because they did not have enough demand to meet their supply. You’re not stealing a dose from a Maryland grandma; you’re keeping all the DMV-areas grandmas safe by getting a Maryland vaccine that would otherwise sit on a shelf. It is not only legal, but I believe also ethical to get vaccinated in Maryland as a DC or Virginia resident.4
Maryland vaccine hunting strategy (tonight through early next week):
If you’re willing to drive to Hagerstown or Salisbury, those supersites offer drive-up vaccination without an appointment starting tomorrow. (M&T Stadium in Baltimore will reportedly also begin offering walk-up appointments next week as well.)
If you’re NOT willing to drive to Hagerstown or Salisbury, or Baltimore next week, or if you just want to have an appointment in hand for certain:
Go to the Maryland pre-registration website to pre-register for a vaccine: The first step is pre-registering in Maryland’s system. This is not an appointment, but rather the step before getting an appointment. Once you’re pre-registered, they’ll call you as appointments become available to schedule a time.
When you pre-register, suggest you consider prioritizing Greenbelt, MD: Per Governor Hogan, the Greenbelt site (run by FEMA) is the one they’re most urging DC and Virginia residents to access. Makes sense, it’s a short shuttle bus from the Greenbelt metro stop and it’s easiest for folks to access. I already know of several individuals who preregistered, listed Greenbelt as their first choice, and got appointments scheduled.
Don’t worry if you don’t get a call right away: Every expansion of eligibility I’ve seen has a common pattern — the highest rush is in the first 1-3 days as the most eager of the newly-eligible are trying to get appointments, and then demand slackens significantly. They’re moving quick, give it a few days.
Respond to the call when you get it. If you can’t call them back (some folks have reported issues with dialing back directly), call the main 1-855-MD-GOVAX number for help.
Once you get a call, go to the appointment.
Share this info with whoever can benefit.
Maryland vaccine hunting strategy (later next week for open season, or today if you meet more restrictive criteria):
Beginning next week, Maryland pharmacies (as well as some number of doctor’s offices, though details TBD) will begin to offer vaccines in open season mode as well. They already offer vaccines for folks who meet a set of criteria that could be described as “eligible in DC, plus smokers.” Here’s how to do it:
If you’re of age, try to get a vaccine through the pharmacies as soon as eligible, but don’t give up if you don’t succeed on the first day — you likely will soon: Every previous expansion of eligibility I’ve seen has a common pattern — the highest rush is in the first 1-3 days as the most eager of the newly-eligible are trying to get appointments, and then demand slackens significantly. At the same time, different pharmacy chains get new shipments on different days of the week, so mid-to-late week you’ll see the chains “reload” with new appointments. Keep checking the sources below.
Play as many hands as you can: Do NOT only rely on only one potential source of vaccine, whether that’s the state-run “supersites” above, pharmacies, or anything else. Try them all.
Use vaccine data aggregators:
In particular, Vaccinespotter.org/MD somehow pulls off the miracle of scraping data directly from pharmacy websites for Walgreens/Duane Reed/Community, CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, etc. They’re really up to date and reliable.
The state of Maryland also has an aggregator, but I don’t find it as easy to use or as up-to-date.
Do NOT use the following:
Vaccinefinder.org has gotten a lot of press, but it is not yet up to date for MD. It will tell you lots of sites where there was vaccine, but not where there is vaccine. They’ll get there, just not there yet for Maryland.
Walgreens website itself is a famously frustrating search engine. It will tell you there are vaccines available and then when you get to the booking step, it will not be available, or it will not let you schedule a first dose appointment because “no second doses are available.” Recommendation: try other chains as your higher priority, but also have a Walgreens account.
Search at weird hours: CVS updates at midnight. Others update at other hours, less predictably, but often in middle of the night or first thing in the morning. Different pharmacy chains get new shipments on different days of the week, so mid-to-late week you’ll see the chains “reload” with new appointments. Keep checking the sources below.
If hitting roadblocks, go to https://www.vaccinehunter.org/ , join the group for your region of MD on Facebook, and get help.
Once vaccinated, don’t forget to remove your name from the DC and/or VA waiting lists.
Then help others in your community get vaccinated: Ask your neighbor, your grocery clerk, your librarian, the elderly folks in your congregation. We’re not safe until we’re all safe.
Welcome to the starting line
About seven weeks ago, I made what was, at the time, a fairly safe yet counter-conventional-wisdom prediction: the majority of people over 16 would be able to get a vaccine on March 31st, plus or minus a week.
I want to be clear — in retrospect, this was a messy prediction with tail risks I probably underestimated. Less than 24 hours after I made it public, we learned that J&J would have a significantly slower delivery schedule than previously announced. Then AstraZeneca and Novavax have been delayed in the approval process more than I expected. I definitely, in retrospect, made this one without considering deeply enough the ways I could be wrong.
In fact, I even chose a meme in early March to celebrate my potential failure, and had a post prepared to go in case I needed it:
But, it turns out, I wasn’t wrong, and if you averaged me in with your “analyst consensus” on this back in February, you’d get a lot closer than a lot of doom and gloomers did. Part of why I was so confident making that prediction was not only that the best experts were making the prediction too, but also that there was a lot of cushion in the prediction, not only on the supply side, but on the demand side too.
And, so, here we are. The Electoral College trains Americans to intuitively infer rough percentages of population from colored state-by-state maps, so you know what this means:
Today, with Hogan and Bowser’s announcements, we’re not only at a clear majority of the US population (which we reached, at the very latest, when Texas announced it was going to open up on March 29th5), but also for a clear majority of the folks who get this newsletter.6
In one sense, this is a big win. In another sense, we’re just arriving at the starting line: "Congratulations, COVID vaccines will soon be as available as flu vaccine is. Many folks don't get an annual flu vaccine. Good luck.” There’s real, hard, meaningful persuasion ahead to help folks understand that the vaccine is safe, that COVID is a real threat, and that we won’t be safe until we get vaccination to a far higher level in our country.
And then, of course, we have to vaccinate the rest of the world to save millions of lives, stop the variants, and free up healthcare capacity again for, y’know, the everyday challenges of car crashes and heart attacks and pneumonia and every other scourge.
But if we can win…well, part of why we assembled the COVID vaccine pipelines (for mRNA and adenoviruses both) so quickly is because they were assembled from emerging technology we were already developing for other things — technology the human race was developing to go after our long-term enemies like malaria, HIV, and cancer. Early research is nascent, but promising. And if we’ve scaled up some pipelines to build these new types of vaccines at scale, and then don’t need them for COVID as much…well, gosh, we’ll have rather the opportunity to use them to go after those killers, too.
Let’s get it done.
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
I really had other content planned for this week, I promise.
I’m sure this was totally pre-planned and not a reaction to Maryland’s announcement. It’s totally normal for the Mayor to announce a super-huge vaccine announcement at random times of evening after holding an entire press conference about vaccines earlier in the day.
Yes, there are some circumstances where non-residents can get vaccinated in Virginia, but it’s not at the level of the Governor explicitly standing there and telling non-residents to come on in.
Delaware is cool too.
This is less easy to decide than you’d think. There’s all sorts of “is that really open season, or only almost open season?” judgments you have to make about states that are clearly trying to be open season without admitting it, like when North Carolina said anyone who’d ever smoked 100 cigarettes — in America’s largest tobacco-producing state — was eligible to be vaccinated. Or how New Mexico is 96% of the way to open season. The below is, frankly, a more accurate version of Benjy Renton’s map above, but more confusingly so. Also, y’know, it had the bad luck of being published right before DC announced, so it’s already inaccurate…
Who are disproportionately in NY or DC. The folks in California have, notionally, 10 more days, but everyone in LA can get vaccinated now like Wil Wheaton if they can drive out to CSU Bakersfield, and most folks in SF can find a supersite with extra doses with a little effort.