Covid-19 Vaccination(s) Comng Soon To An Undisclosed Location Near You! / Reading Wednesday

      . . . .  Governor announced vaccine arrival in our state  by December 15th, so surely to all the other states too?

The sooner the better, but there's a really long time to go, a really long time.  Also, recall, it seems no matter which Big Pharma created the vaccine one is to receive, two shots are necessary to be protected (nobody knows for how long the protection will be effective, but most likely we'll have to do this at least every 12 months).

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today that New York's first Pfizer vaccine delivery is expected to come on December 15th, and will be enough doses for 170,000 New Yorkers. [Which means, since each vaccination to be effective must be administered twice, for about 85,000 NYers.]

A second round of 170,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which will constitute the second dosage for those designated people, will arrive 21 days later. The state is expecting additional allocations of the Pfizer vaccine, as well as the Moderna vaccine, later in the month or in early January as well.

Cuomo added that by the end of December, the Trump administration suggests there will be enough to vaccinate another 20 million people with two dosages across the country, making up 6% of the population of the United States.

Per CDC recommendations, New York's vaccination program will prioritize healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in phase one. There are approximately 85,000 nursing home residents and 130,000 nursing home staff members in New York, so the first round of vaccines will not cover all of those people. Cuomo hopes that the second round of vaccines later in the month will at least cover that entire group of 210,000+ people....

Keep in mind, please, this date is for arrival of vaccine -- though since it seems necessary it needs to be kept super-cold, They should probably being going to work immediately.

But will they?

 So it not only does distribution mean jabbing people, but paperwork so they can be jabbed three weeks? two weeks? later, again.  Records must be kept!  Recall, my state is still counting ballots from the election last month.  Among the multiple, well, to be honest, uncounted, problems -- piles of ballots from who knows where because the yellow stickies fell off.

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It's Reading Wednesday Somebody/ies Say!  Here is a novel I would recommend for those who are interested in King Arthur and historical fiction set during the Dark Ages.  (Which of course I am interested because so little has been known about these years, but, thanks to archeaology and relentless scholarship, we discover a little more history all the time.

The Lost Queen (2018) was the first installment in Signe Pike's projected trilogy.  The Forgotten Kingdom (2020) is the trilogy's middle volume, and writer's second novel. Unlike many middle volumes, this one is more compelling in terms of both character and action, than the first one.  The writer writes vivid descriptions of the natural world of the setting -- as much as possible she's visited her sites, and what remains of them. The result is that I felt I was seeing what the characters are described as seeing. It is composed around the Arthurian origin mythologies that are centered location-wise in what we now call Scotland -- north of The Wall. The chronology is the later 6th century; the Romans are gone, Angles are 'invading', and to my personal historic thinking, Europe and England already have had nearly a century of the Dark Ages.* The Christian persecutions of the Old Religions in the region has been well underway for decades already. Considering this isn't the Victorian re-imagining of the age, as in Idylls of the King, well, yes, this books does contain brutal, bloody, cruel and abusive scenes.  It wouldn't be right if it did not.  Some victims survive, some do not, and others survive but are forever affected. The writer has good instincts, to do justice, but not dwell or revel.  

*    Why do I persist in calling the eras from late in the 5th Century to maybe the 9th Century and Charlemagne, the Dark Ages? It'such an old-fashioned way to view history, mostly considered out of date for any up to date medieval historian -- rather like maintaining the War of the Rebellion of the USA's 19th century wasn't caused by the issue of slavery, or that Rome 'fell' in the 5th century.  I keep calling these years the Dark Ages  because it was in the 5th century that Christianity became definitively official state religion of Rome, East as well as West, the plagues and famines which came relentlessly, until quite some time later, by which time the 'classical' or 'pagan' worlds had been erased for practical purposes, i.e. official, state, political, legal, religious monopoly by the Church., and things started to get crazy due to Christians determing intolerance of anything not determined by authority -- which led to many slaughters of each other, as well as of 'pagans and all the other Others.

These two Romes did build out from all the classical Roman political and administrative structures -- thus to my mind Rome didn't fall either, buy that didn't stop the Dark Ages of plagues, wars, famines and many other catastrophes. What was left was a shell within which cruel intolerance festered -- kind of like the restaurants here that now rule the streets -- they have been built out of the far more stable structures of the indoor restaurants.  Indeed, they have come to be called, "Streeteateries," (even a step down from 'eateries,' a designation NY food reviewers are fond of) --  and are hit by cars -- frequently.  Still as that was still Rome, people still eat and drink in these flimsy pretenses of fine dining.