As of yesterday morning, I've gotten my first shot of the ModeRNA¹ COVID-19 vaccine!

I'd been trying to get an appointment since Berkeley opened them up to all adults on April 9th, and had no luck until 3am on Friday morning, when I managed to get one of the spots released by the CVS near my house (they were all gone a few minutes later). I was surprised to find when I arrived at CVS that, despite the intense competition to get vaccinated, supply is so tight that they were only being issued 10 doses (one vial) per day.

It's so frustrating that vaccines are still so hard to get here, and yet doses are sitting unused around the country. I don't know what the solution is to convince rural Republicans to get vaccinated, but I hope someone comes up with something to prevent the ultra-conservative parts of America from serving as a breeding ground for weird SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Anyhow, while I'm writing a post on COVID-19, here are some fun links:

• Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine: I assume everyone's read this one already but it's a great explanation of something I know very little about
• Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines: Another very nitty-gritty cool article
• Deep Cleaning Isn’t a Victimless Crime: I feel like all of my news sources have been making it clear that this virus spreads through the air and not through surfaces for the last, like, 10 months, but I guess a lot of people have gotten hung up on crazy and useless "deep cleaning". Hopefully we can get past that and stop making the entire world smell like bleach. I guess this Lancet article has been very influential?

At this point I'm kind of vacillating between optimism that we're all going to be vaccinated and safe soon, and deep pessimism that the right wing media echo chamber has created an insurmountable barrier of misinformed people with a near-pathological antipathy towards science and public health, even if we do make it through this pandemic, the next one is going to be some real Dark Ages shit.

Fun stuff.

Stay safe out there.