32. Finally Vaccinated

I left Sweden before vaccinations were available for my age group and I have since then enquired about the possibility of getting my shots at numerous places. In Italy and Spain. It’s not that I am overly concerned with getting Covid, it has more to do with being able to move freely between countries and regions. Which is the whole point with long distance cruising. It has not really been a problem to date but, as far as I understand, it will be a real nuisance when you get to the Caribbean with all its independent island nations. On top of this, I also want to do my part in ending this pandemic and I find it hard to complain about the restrictions if I don’t contribute to a possible solution.

Whenever I have called local Covid hotlines, the Swedish embassy or visited a vaccination centre, I have been told the same thing. ‘We only vaccinate people registered in our health care system so you have to go to your home country and get your shots’. I have argued that we bought the vaccine together and that as an EU citizen I have equal rights to it. And that it is better for everyone if I am vaccinated too. To no avail until I got to a hospital in Lanzarote where nobody spoke English. I decided to do my best to not understand when they were giving me the same story as everywhere else. This time they finally they gave up. I didn’t need to speak Spanish to understand when one of them said something like ‘let’s just register him, give him the bloody vaccine and get rid of him’.

So I have got one dose of Pfizer and will get the next one together with my vaccine certificate in three weeks. Hopefully this will make the next part of the journey easier. It will certainly give me more time to prepare for the Atlantic crossing as I don’t have to fly back to Sweden twice to get my shots.