No I don’t have the monkey pox. At least not yet. But I did manage to get my first vaccine dose. And it feels like a big accomplishment, let me tell you!
For as progressive a state as Minnesota is, and as gay as Minneapolis is, you would think the vaccine rollout would be decently handled. I mean, we did really well with the Covid vax rollout and availability. But the monkeypox? Different story.
There was not a ton of readily available info on where or how to get it, and unfortunately info is still pretty sketchy. It turns out There is only one place administering the vaccine so far, and that’s the “Free Clinic” – county health services here in the mini apple. But getting an appointment?
What a fuckin rigamarole.
Thankfully I have friends that went through the process and through the magic of social media and the gay cohort, good information started to trickle in. The powers that be weren’t making getting vaccinated easy. Probably because they weren’t ready for the onslaught and needed to slow roll it.
To get an appointment, you couldn’t just call the clinic. Oh no. If you Called the main number, you couldn’t get through due to call volume. And if you did, you were shunted elsewhere. Instead, the workaround was you had to call a special triage nurse number. But still it was like calling a cable TV service center help line. All our operators are busy…. And the message was tricky. It tried to get you to press a number and leave a message.
The trick was to hold until you got a live person. Then you had to answer questions about your health and sexual activity to see if you “qualified” as high risk enough to warrant the vaccine. Early on, one of the qualifiers was if you had had 10 sexual partners in the past 2 weeks. (AEye roll emoji).
Spoiler: I qualified.
Spoiler spoiler: by the time I called, the number of partners had been greatly reduced to “more than one in the past 2 weeks.
So, evidently only gay sluts and whores can get the vaccine now. Thanks for the additional stigma, Minnesota! Awesome! But at least I was able to get an appointment, although the earliest they could get me in was a week and a half later.
Long story short- it’s a week and a half later and I got the shot yesterday at lunch. No adverse effects yet. No banana cravings. No additional hair growth or poop flinging. And my second shot is booked for early September so, at least there’s that.
And now I have some additional protection for when I go to P-town at the end of this month.
Mangina Monologues 
I’ve heard you have to wait six weeks from the initial shot for the vac to be effective. Have you heard differently?
In my case they’re saying anyone vaccinated prior to 1969 using smallpox vaccine you’re pretty much good with monkepox