## DENIED THE COVID VACCINE :: preliminary report on Danvers, with updates On 9-April-2021, I was arbitrarily discriminated against, and denied access to the COVID vaccine. As far as I could determine, the people responsible for starting this nonsense were Curative employees assigned to the Danvers MA mass-vaccination site. Unfortunately, several other people including the local EMS and police officers got drawn into the situation in a way that was already biased against me, rather than simply de-escalating the problem and allowing normal delivery to complete. Instead of supporting the public health effort as they were supposed to, they collectively decided to humiliate and bully me over my appearance, and thus directly impede the process of public vaccination for no valid reason. And they chose exactly the wrong moment to start this party. I had signed up with the "vaxfinder" website in Massachusetts, and a few days later received an email saying vaccine appointments were available nearby with a link to sign up for one. That process itself was a little lumpy and the details of that are not relevant here, but I scheduled an appointment and arrived to the Doubletree hotel site in Danvers in plenty of time. I had my ID and my appointment documentation, and waited until the right time to mask up and go into the building. I was guided through the waiting line [that had almost nobody in it], sat in the staging area at one end of the ballroom for less than ten minutes, and was directed over to one of the numbered tables where the doses were being administered. I gave the attending nurses my appointment details and ID, they verified my paperwork and prepared a dose, and the orderly next to me was mere seconds from injecting it into my arm. Everything had been completely normal and routine up to that point. That's about when someone else came over and started telling me I could not receive a vaccine without having something on my feet -- an utterly ridiculous assertion right up front. But this person, and I think it might have been a site manager named "Delena" at that point, kept insisting. She ordered the nurse, who was sitting there *holding the syringe*, to stop everything while we waited for this interloper to go get someone else and come back. The nurse, unfortunately, complied with this and didn't simply go ahead and jab my arm and get the job over with. The complainer returned, along with some big beefy guy from the local EMS squad, presumably with intent to be accompanied by someone authoritative and threatening-looking. As far as I know that person was John Sossei, from the first name he told me and a legend on his shirt, and is with either the Danvers or Middleton unit. He stood there looming over me, with gear at his belt and a microphone strapped to his chest, saying "okay, let's go." Go where? I was dumbfounded that anyone's time was suddenly being wasted with this nonsense, especially right now as I sat there next to the nurse with my sleeve pulled up. At least one police officer also approached the group behind them. Already I felt that I was being treated like somewhere between a 5-year-old and a raving terrorist. I asked all present why they even thought my omission of footwear was any kind of issue, and of course nobody had a sensible answer, they just kept stating that I could not get vaccinated without shoes on. They basically wouldn't listen to anything I said, other than starting to get accusatory that *I* was somehow being "disruptive" and not to "make a scene". Nothing could be further from the truth: there was no "disruption" or "scene" until they approached and began harassing me. They seemed to believe that footwear was more important than all of us collectively fighting the virus. I was rather nervous at this point, because they showed no sign of simply letting things be so I could complete what I had come there to get done. I had no choice but to get up, and be summarily escorted out of the building. With no vaccine. I was told that if I could go "buy a pair of shoes" or something equally insulting, that I could come back in and get a vaccine. At one point near the exit door I had about eight people circled around me all chiming in with their discriminatory flavors of BS, from the old "no shoes no shirt" nonsense to "omg it's a medical area" and verging on actual threats, and absolutely none of it presenting any valid concerns. It was a complete waste of at least ten minutes for everyone there, including Delena and other Curative people, the EMS guy, and two or three police officers. One of the officers tried to tell me that it's illegal to drive without shoes, which is well known to be completely false. Several of the officers were wearing their own masks wrong, either with the "nose problem" or completely off. I was unable to get the identies or affiliations of any of the police. I went out to my car and spent the next half-hour plus on the phone with Curative customer service, demanding continued escalation until they could figure out who was in charge at the Danvers site and intervene in realtime to straighten these people out so I could get back in there. Long holds ensued, and the upshot I was told was that it was unlikely they would be able to do anything like that for another hour or more. Various managers were in meetings, it was Friday afternoon so several key people had already finished their work weeks, etc. And of course most people are working from home and all they have to communicate with each other is a slow text-based system where a lot of information can get delayed or lost. When someone adopts a practice to benefit their own physical and mental wellness, and that practice harms absolutely no one else, who should have any right to use that as an excuse to deny or diminish service? Especially a desperately needed PUBLIC HEALTH effort like vaccines to protect all of us? I simply decline wearing shoes, for my own health and mobility reasons -- I don't need them or want them, and it's been the case for most of my life. Perhaps it's somewhat unusual, but it is none of anyone else's business or concern. Feel free to think of it as a combination of spiritual conviction tied with healthier living, and be careful what you discriminate against. My feet don't create any sort of liability issue, as nobody other than myself is responsible for them regardless of location or setting. Everyone involved in this fiasco was in the wrong, swept up in the lie and arrayed in a bully-gang against me, making a completely unfounded connection between my footwear choices and the vaccination effort or COVID or something equally unrelated. If they had told me that to enter the building I needed to be wearing a red hat with white lettering, it would have been equally ridiculous and equally driven by brainwashing and ignorant prejudice. I told the Curative customer-service supervisor that I was not going to leave the site before getting vaccinated. Nobody had a valid excuse for denying someone a life-saving medicine on the basis of what they're wearing in a street-legal fashion. I did have a possible alternative, and after digging around in the car found that I had a ratty pair of my minimal Chinese-style shoes, little more than slippers, but it was something. Wearing these things actually makes my situation LESS safe, where my gait is more clumsy and places me at greater risk of a slip and fall incident. The only reason I have them at all is for a token appearance of wearing shoes; I can't really do anything serious in them. With these in hand I went back to the entrance, and was immediately accosted by a person inside the door, with a Curative nametag, that I needed shoes. While putting on what I had I asked him why anyone thought that such a "policy" was needed at all, and another person also with a Curative tag came up behind me and tried to reinforce the claim. Again, I asked why. This second person, whose nametag only identified him as "Darren F.", had come up very close to me, while answering something like "I don't know, you just do". I asked him to please back away and maintain distancing, and he did not. Instead, he started saying just softly enough for only me to hear, "what are you going to do about it? Huh? How about we go outside?" and still failing to back off. He was actually threatening me with physical violence. Someone with that kind of attitude needs to never be placed in any public- facing employment role. Finally I stood there with these dumb slippers on my feet and received approval from those standing around including the TWO police officers who had followed me in, one of which had actually mentioned something about declaring trespass on me if I asked any more questions, and said something about how I would not be allowed back into that site for the second dose at all regardless of my manner of attire. Of all the overblown garbage and outright bully talk. Frankly, I am quite certain that if I was a person of color he would have gleefully had me face-down on the lawn outside by then. Instead, I was finally approved to go get my shot, and the rest of the procedure was fairly uneventful. I received a first-dose confirmation card and an appointment for the second one later in the month. I tried to inform Delena of what "Darren F." had said to me at the entrance, and she pretended to not even know who he was and refused to do anything about it. The same large EMS guy was near the exit door and tried to give me a mock cheery greeting as I went out, which he knew perfectly well was just adding more insult to the whole dumpster-fire. The shared raw hatred toward someone a little "different" that I encountered in the whole process felt thicker than anything could cut, and was 100% inappropriate for anyone in public-service positions. I called Curative again to add the information about Darren's actions and Delena's non-response to the incident ticket, and was again promised a prompt callback from one of their third-tier people as part of the "investigation". The customer-service staff on the phones at Curative were sympathetic and seemed unable to understand why anyone on the site would object to bare feet by one's own choice, and were generally supportive and even somewhat admiring as I described how I go through all aspects of my life without shoes. Having finally gotten the vaccine, I got home three-plus hours later, still shaking with anger, after a round trip that should have taken half that time. All patently ridiculous, and distinctly upsetting. Obviously if Danvers had been a drive-through site, none of this would have even come up. What the heck ever happened to "First, do no harm" ?? I felt plenty harmed by their petty little power-trip, and that's all it was. Hampered in taking a life-saving vaccine, forced to use footwear that increases my own risk, and an entire afternoon of emotional stress. You tell me who was doing the harming. For police officers to not only join into this bullying but to also spout total falsehoods in the process was rather disturbing, so I made some more calls. I spoke with a detail-supervisor lieutenant in the Danvers police department, who told me that he only had one officer on that site detail and that most of the others were probably from Middleton, since the hotel is very near the town line and responsibility is shared. So I also spoke to a supervisor with the Middleton PD and described the situation again. Both of those police supervisors were also sympathetic and indicated that booting me out of the site was likely the wrong procedure, and they promised to find out who had been detailed to the site and speak to them about it. The promised callback from Curative never came that afternoon, so I figured everything would have to wait until the following Monday. Meanwhile, I was looking up contact info for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the AG's office. Initial contacts there returned a whole spectrum of favorability in responses, with most of them sympathetic and verging on disbelief that an incident like this could play out as badly as it did. This situation MUST be rectified well before my second appointment, and the people involved sharply reprimanded if not FIRED OUTRIGHT. This is an absolutely intolerable situation, and should have never happened to me or anyone else. The right answer is not for anyone to meekly submit to this abuse, the right answer is education. Next time they see me, they need to be nothing less than profusely and sincerely apologetic for what happened. It is hard to believe that supposed *medical professionals* would stoop to such demeaning, insulting behavior toward any member of the public they are sworn to serve, especially when the LIVES of the populace are on the line like this and everyone should be concentrating on what matters. Updates as they happen; this story is far from over. What's especially ironic is that I have worked shows in that very same hotel ballroom where the vaccinations were being held, doing technical functions like lighting and electrics. That was a couple of years ago, and if anyone thinks I wore shoes for that, they'd be quite mistaken. The hotel people certainly didn't care one way or the other; there was no reason to. _H* 210411 ======================================================== === UPDATES ... === ======================================================== Over the course of the next week I made several more contacts, trying to locate people in charge of various facets of the vaccination effort. I filed an online complaint with the Attorney General's office, and a couple of days later someone called from there and suggested that I talk to the Department of Public Health. Well, guess what, I had already talked to them, except that the only sub-department I could reach there was Epidemiology. That would seem relevant, wouldn't it, but nobody there seemed to know who was managing the vaccine logistics at all, or perhaps the key people were being deliberately insulated from the public. One or two attempts to contact local press vanished into a black hole, no response. And I hadn't even given any specifics they could key on to reject my contact out of hand, just "discriminatory denial of vaccine access" and asking if anyone was interested in covering it. They certainly covered when our own Governor Baker stood up in front of the cameras early in the rollout effort, denouncing how confused and dysfunctional it had been during a fairly rough launch, saying "Yeah, I'd be pissed too". I bet they wouldn't throw *him* out if he chose to show up barefoot. I found an email address for the fire chief supervising John Sossei the EMS guy, and wrote to the effect of how John had been in a perfect position to simply *de-escalate* the whole situation when the Curative site-manager dragged him into the fray. Instead, he went off on his own little power-trip to aid and abet the hate-fest taking root around me, adding his own prejudice and desire to control others to the mix. He could have easily asked the site person to calm down and simply let the nurses finish, and *then* someone could come to the post-vaccine waiting area and engage me in civil conversation about their concerns. We could even have taken *that* conversation outdoors into the nice day, although not in the "Darren F." sense, so I could still be under post-vaccine observation. I kept pursuing the case with Curative, just to make sure they wouldn't just sweep it under the rug. Supervisors promised to me for conversation kept being conveniently "out today", a transparent tactic expressing their hope that I'd just go away if ignored for long enough. A couple of reps tried to backpedal and say that footwear was "policy". I asked for pre-existing proof, and by that I didn't mean some quick and dirty piece of text they threw together in the last week just because of me. Of course they didn't have any such document. A little background investigation of Curative itself turned up a streetview of a tiny windowless light-industry commercial building in an L.A. suburb, that could not possibly house their claimed extent of lab space, but is nonetheless their mailing address. As noted on its own website, Curative is a very young company, started up just before the pandemic for some other purpose but managed to "pivot" to COVID testing efforts early on. While some of their staff might have hailed from longer career paths, the collective company experience is likely not so deep. Maybe that's a stretch, but it could lead to a more knee-jerk, personally-sourced response to an unusual situation rather than researching it first. Responses from various Curative employees had been quite mixed, so it was pretty clear that they really had no idea and were simply guessing. About a week later I had a long conversation with Jeannie Smith, the "VP of Customer Success" at Curative, who was handling the internal investigation based on my complaints. She had actually listened to all of the phone call recordings, understood the full extent of how upset I had been, and still had yet to actually have conversations with the relevant staff back at the Danvers facility. Clearly, progress on this had been pretty slow and only throgh my persistence had it finally reached her desk. Despite every attempt to reassure her otherwise, Jeannie persisted in her misimpression that Curative was somehow responsible for anything happening to my feet inside the vaccination facility. The legal truth is that they're not. What she did point out correctly, though, is that everyone is still on edge over the COVID crisis and super-sensitive to anything "out of the ordinary" that could be interpreted as affecting "sanitation". That is junk science and patently ridiculous, as someone's sneaker treads are going to carry a lot more dog poop into the facility than my soles, but here's why her point held some amount of validity: she was endorsing the benefit of "blending in" without triggering the ignorant. A crisis does tend to bring out the stupid in certain demographics, and this was one of the large-scale facilities with a very diverse stream of people going through it. I think what she was trying to say was that for the peace of mind of everyone *else* around the place, she was asking me to give them one less thing to worry about or have to internally analyze and understand. With much of the facility staff probably hired in locally and not vetted as thoroughly as they might have been in the haste, we could be far less sure of anyone's psychological makeup. More importantly, she completely agreed that the situation *had* been handled very badly. The "right place", she said, to bounce me would have been at the front door, which of course is the more typical point where barefooters get filtered out. But since that didn't happen, she concurred, making a mess of things halfway through the vaccine process was *not* the right thing to do. So this left me with pretty much no choice but to shuffle through the second dose visit in china-flats, and hope that none of the clown-crew would recognize me. I guess masks can help with that too, huh? If any of those people met me happily pounding along a trail full of sharp rocks in Breakheart or Lynn Woods or another nearby park, they would have nothing but respect for the way I choose to go at it. They wouldn't think for one moment that if I had a little foot-booboo in the woods, that I could turn around and try to sue the DCR or something. It's a sad situation that social prejudice can be so unrelatedly location-dependent, and still influenced by sixty-year-old false mythology. _H* 210418