Which is what I was resigned to, until I drove by a huge outdoor, drive-through setup that took walk-ins, located in the parking lot near the animal shelter in San Martin. Very professionally run, and I was in and out in 20 minutes. And yet had I not chosen to drive Monterey instead of 101 that day, I would never have heard or seen it, and it is not on a street most people would use.
The backwater of Redmond. CVS, Walgreens (EDIT: Walgreens now shows appointments 2 weeks out), not a one of them showed an appointment less than a month out, if they bothered to show an appointment at all. Which reminds me of another annoyance: why not show ‘next available’ instead of making me click through each day to see if there’s an appointment?
My wife instantly signed up when it was available and got a booster within a couple days. I waited a few days and my appointment was a month out.
We also waited a couple of days for our 6 year old and the appointment was 2 weeks out.
Honestly, I've been able to get both my vaccines (flu and Covid booster) by chance. I came across a vaccine drive run by my town's senior center and went to that for Covid, and then yesterday I happened to walk by the pharmacy in a Target and they were taking walk-ins for flu shots.
Thankfully I live in a state where the leaders really want people to get vaccinated. Yesterday I was driving around an area where there are a lot of illegal immigrants and there were signs all over the place saying "no ID necessary" for a COVID vaccine.
I had the exact same experience as you, but figured I just didn't know where to look. The earliest appointments on my local government website were for weeks out. And, each pharmacy had its own booking website. Surely, there must be someone working on integrating all these fragmented schedules into a single source of truth, and they're just doing a poor job advertising their solution?
Okay, I’ll try CVS/Walgreens/et. al. If you don’t mind waiting until February, I guess that’s an option. Finally I just gave up and scheduled an appointment within the next two weeks at a clinic 90 minutes away. Then we happened to walk into healthcare provider Kaiser that is ten minutes from home: big fucking arrows and signs, “Walk-ins welcome!!!!11” And so we went back the next day and got our booster shots. But here’s my question/complaint: Kaiser is also the clinic that’s 90 minutes away, where we scheduled our original appointment. On the Kaiser site, there is not a single mention of a walk-in option.
My conclusion is that we appear to have to rely on Facebook posts, and rumors from friends to find a booster because the “official” channels are either not useful or just plain abandoned.