UCLA seems to be following the LA County route rather than the Alaska approach. It recently sent an email to eligible employees (those 65+) saying it had established a system to vaccinate them. At the same time, it has been - seemingly at random - sending unsolicited invitations to get vaccinated to UC Health patients who are eligible and who are not employees.
Yours truly is both a patient and an eligible employee. He got an email as a patient some days ago saying he would be contacted. But as a patient, no further communications were received. However, as an employee - there has been communication. That's the good news. The bad news is what then ensued. There seems to be a penalty for working for UCLA as opposed to just being a patient. Read on...
As an employee, yours truly received an email saying that before he could be vaccinated, he had to be "trained" about vaccines. And, in order to be trained, he had to fill out an online form. Among other items, he was asked to name his "supervisor." (Faculty, of course, don't think of themselves as having supervisors.) But yours truly dutifully filled in the name of the dean of the Luskin School where he is teaching this quarter. He was then asked for the email address of the dean/supervisor. The system told him the email address was "invalid" although it was in fact correct. So yours truly put his own email address. The system accepted that incorrect address as valid. And then it was on to the training.
The online training turned out to be around 50 (repeat 50!!!!) web pages of material. The last page was footnotes, presumably references documenting the previous pages. Then there was a "test," ostensibly on the material supposedly learned. In fact, with common sense, you could pass the test without having gone through the pages and pages of training: A few multiple-choice questions indicating it was a good idea to follow CDC guidelines was the essence of the test. Yours truly hasn't heard of anyone elsewhere who needed training and a test to get vaccinated. Even the LA County system - bad as it has been - doesn't include training and a test on the training as a requirement. It simply tells you no appointments are available.* Some Murphy Hall lawyer must have cooked up the training/test requirement. You can see the legal mind at work. What if someone sues? If we can show that they were trained about the vaccine, then we can show they assumed the risk. But I digress...
Second, having passed the test, yours truly was supposed to receive a "confirmation." None came. So he made a fuss, using an email address provided as a contact for problems, and a confirmation eventually arrived (including the name of the dean with the incorrect email address that the system liked). The email contact, by the way, is something called the Center for Nursing Excellence. I will let the irony of Excellence speak for itself.
Anyway, the hoops to jump through didn't end with the confirmation. The original email that kicked all this off said after you were trained and tested, you would then receive a "survey" (presumably a health survey - although UCLA has all of my medical records). No survey has arrived as of this morning. Yours truly has again sent off a request. And there the matter rests. Who knows what hurdles will follow the survey - if it ever comes?
Maybe I should fly to Anchorage.
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*The LA County system includes two UCLA Health offices as vaccination sites, one in Calabasas and the other in Thousand Oaks. (Thousand Oaks isn't in LA County so why it is listed is a mystery.) When yours truly checked for appointments there, both offices indicated that appointments were available and the Thousand Oaks office of UCLA Health actually gave two different available times. But when you clicked on either time, you got a strange computer message saying, in effect, that there were no appointments.
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