It’s time to come clean about something.

In the past, the Outpost, like other local media sources, may have left its readers with the impression that the way people get a COVID vaccine appointment is the way local and state health officials say you’re supposed to get an appointment: You sign up on a government list, where you enter your demographic, vocational and prior health particulars, and then you wait. When your turn is up, they send you your invitation.

But this is not actually how people get vaccinated. Or else, perhaps, it’s only one of the ways people get vaccinated. It’s been four months now, though, and I don’t believe that anyone I know in Humboldt has gotten their vaccine that way. I do know a lot of people in Humboldt who have received their vaccine in other ways. It’s time to talk about those other ways, and it’s time to stop pretending that the official, government-promulgated story about how to go about getting vaccinated bears much relation to reality.

We’ll start with my own case. Yesterday morning, the governor announced that the state would expand vaccine eligibility to anyone 50 years and older on April 1. I am 52. So I sent a message to my doctor’s office – the first I had sent since vaccinations began – to ask about the possibility of getting an appointment on that date. I did this despite knowing that Humboldt County heath officials would likely say, as they have in the past, that there simply isn’t enough vaccine on hand locally to expand eligibility as quickly as the state would like.

Then something unexpected happened. The office called back yesterday evening and said: Would you like to come in tomorrow morning? I said: Sure. And so now, as you read this, I am the proud owner of a vaccine card and one shot of Moderna.

Why did I get a vaccine a full week before I am technically eligible? Did the medical staff look at my chart and see something they didn’t like, and so bend the rules on my behalf? Were they having trouble filling up Friday’s clinic, and so were taking anyone at all who said they wanted one? I didn’t ask, and so I don’t know the answer. All I know is that, in contravention of my official state vaccine eligibility – and especially in contravention of my local, Humboldt County vaccine eligibility, which is much tighter than the state’s – my doctor gave me a vaccine appointment. I took it.

As expected, on Thursday afternoon Humboldt County Public Health officials gave out their first, tentative hints that we, here, will not follow the state in expanding eligibility to people 50 and older on April 1, and to anyone over 16 on April 15. In a press release

[t]hey pointed out that clinics for workers in agricultural production began last week, and some grocery, restaurant and other food workers are receiving appointment invitations through their employers this week with more expected in the coming weeks. Health officials went on to say that current allocations would not allow for expansion to additional groups without the significant increase in supply forecast by the governor today.

This follows a pattern that should be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention over the last few months. The state expands eligibility – to teachers, say, or to people over 65 – and the county says: Oh, that would be nice, but we simply don’t have enough vaccine to do that yet.

But at the same time, puzzlingly enough, Public Health acknowledges and condones the fact that the people doing the vaccinating pay very little heed to what Public Health says about who should be vaccinated when. For the purest distillation of this, take a look at this Feb. 25 media availability with Humboldt County’s health officer, Dr. Ian Hoffman. Hoffman first answers a series of questions about local vaccine eligibility – Can we start vaccinating food workers now? What about people with serious medical conditions? What about the homeless population? – with the same answer: Sadly, not enough vaccine for that yet.

Yet moments later, when the Outpost asks him about the legions of stories of people breezing right past the vaccine cordon he himself has set in place, Hoffman says: We are not in the business of policing that.