SAN FRANCISCO — The great H1N1 vaccine hunt has begun, with Americans setting their phones to speed-dial the local health department and pulling kids out of school at the hint shots might be available at a flu clinic.
More is on the way. There were 30 million doses of the vaccine available for states to order as of Monday, says Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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That number is lower than 40 million doses the CDC had hoped to have available by the end of October. Production problems and delays caused the shortfall.
So for now, it takes skill, tenacity and sometimes luck to get the coveted shots and squirts.
Heather Wiley Starankovic of Philadelphia was calling her pediatrician every day to find out if doctors had the vaccine so she could get her 14-month-old daughter, Hadley, inoculated.
"The nurse said, 'They tell us it's on a plane, it's on a train, it's coming, but we don't know when.' "
Finally, during her lunch hour Friday, she checked e-mail and saw that someone on a neighborhood parent's e-mail list posted that there would be vaccine at a free health clinic about two blocks from the Starankovics' house. "I called my husband and had him wake our daughter up from her nap, and I left work and picked them up and we all went down."
In Washington state, David Fleming, director of the Public Health Department for Seattle and King County, says the vaccine most likely won't be widely available in King County until December, and possibly even after Christmas.
Smoothing out the wait
In San Francisco, Becky Brian and her husband needed to get themselves vaccinated because their 4-month-old daughter is having surgery in two weeks, and they don't want to risk infecting her.
They got to a neighborhood clinic promptly at 4 p.m. Thursday when it opened. Three hours later they were still in line.
It wasn't that the clinic didn't have enough vaccine; there were only two people giving them.
Finally, at 7 p.m. a clinic worker told them that the nurses giving the shots had to leave.
"They went through the line and pulled out all the pregnant women and made sure they got in," and everyone else got green tickets and the promise they could go to the front of the line during the next clinic, Brian says.
On Friday the couple arrived at 6 p.m., and their green tickets got them sent to the front of the clinic line. "We were in and out of there in about 15 minutes," she says.
Things were going much more smoothly, in part because two more people were brought in to administer vaccine. "People generally seemed less frenzied than the night before," Brian says.
But across the countryin New Jersey, the vaccine is still hard to find. What's driving Lisa Yourman, 50, of Fair Lawn, N.J., crazy is that there seems to be no way to ensure that the highest-risk people get the shot first. Both her son, 16, and daughter, 19, have the chronic lung disease cystic fibrosis, and she's frantic to get them vaccinated.
"The president's children, who are perfectly healthy, were able to get the swine flu shot. Why are the high risk kids not getting it? " she says.
Calls over a three-county area and even talking to her state representative haven't turned up vaccine. "If the government can't control how an influenza shot is being distributed and follow through with the protocols set by the CDC, how are we going to run a health-care system?"
People still considerate
But in other areas distribution is going smoothly. Lisa Palfi, 40, heard last Wednesday on the radio in Cheyenne, Wyo., that the vaccine would be available at the county health department. She had her aunt pick up her daughters from school. "They only waited about 45 minutes," Palfi says.
Only the CDC's target groups — health workers, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illness — could get the vaccine.
Kim Binkley, 47, has heart failure. She and her husband stood in the pouring rain for three hours Friday at the Butler County Fair Grounds in Hamilton, Ohio, to get vaccinated.
"We got there at 6:30 a.m., so we were first in line," she says. By the time they were done, it had swelled to 6,000, and people were being turned away.
Despite the wait, people were polite, she says. One elderly man arrived about 25 minutes before doors opened. A sheriff's deputy helped him to the front "and nobody said anything, because he could barely even stand."
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