Well, my fellow Gen-X AstraZeneca peeps… our time has come. We’re in the midst of the rolling 8-week follow-ups, and, with a ton of vaccine making its way here (including a bonus one million doses of Moderna that was just announced), we’re in great shape. On top of the endless stream of Pfizer we’re getting these days, we’ll have gotten 7 million doses of Moderna in June. Fourteen million doses of something will have shown up between now and July 1st.

There’s a sort of “the world is your oyster” feeling you get sometimes… like, if you’re skiing, and you time it just right, and you get to the top of the run just as it opens… and nobody has skied on it yet, and it’s all fresh, pristine snow from the night before; an endless ocean of powder… all yours. Or, on a much simpler level, the feeling you get when you open a box from Amazon, and whatever is in there is packed in bubble wrap… and not the cheap, tiny half-popped useless ones that have been endlessly recycled; I mean a sheet of fresh, un-popped big-bubbles… and there’s no one around, so you can take your sweet time popping every single one of them. Aaaahhhhh……

Anyway, that is the feeling I got this morning when I received my vaccine second-dose invitation. As we all know, the right move at this point is to pick up the phone and call; that is the usual way to get the soonest appointment possible, because the people on the other end of the phone have access to a schedule view that we don’t. We have to go location by location.

But… before I called, I thought I’d check online… on the day I wanted (Monday) at the location I wanted (nearby community center) hoping maybe with some luck, there’s something. Anything.

Instead, I was flooded with options. Every single timeslot at that location had availability, from early morning to late at night. A pristine ski run. A big long sheet of huge unpopped bubbles. And this… oh, how beautiful it was.

For what it’s worth, I’m booked for an mRNA vaccine; whether it’s Pfizer or Moderna, they’re interchangeable with respect to today’s NACI recommendation of following-up an AstraZeneca jab with either version of an mRNA vaccine.

As I’ve said before, I’d “probably” already decided on a Pfizer/Moderna follow-up because of the emerging research; research which was meant to show up right around the time I would’ve been needing to make a decision. As it turns out, both things landed within hours of each other… but I’ll say it again, the “take whatever is given to you” is by far not the worst strategy. If my decision were AstraZeneca tomorrow or Pfizer/Moderna in two weeks, I wouldn’t be waiting. It’d be AZ tomorrow.

Indeed – there’s no wrong answer; some studies seem to imply that two doses of AstraZeneca offers a stronger cellular immune response than the mRNA alternatives. Choose whatever works for you. “The sooner the better” might be the only decision that really needs consideration… but as long as you get it, it was the right choice.

You’ll eventually reach the bottom of the ski hill. You’ll eventually have popped every bubble on the sheet. And eventually, with a notable shout-out to this smorgasbord of vaccines, we’ll have put this pandemic behind us.