President Joe Biden likes to say, “Here’s the deal.” He says it a lot. Here’s something else he and others are saying a lot.
Politico: President Joe Biden spent the first months of his presidency hunkered down as he worked on getting more vaccines into people’s arms ….
USA Today: States and counties are getting better at the nitty-gritty of what’s required to get COVID-19 vaccine into arms, but …
New York Times: How Quickly Are Shots Going in Arms?
Washington Post: Taddeo called for thinking “outside the box” to get more shots in arms.
NPR: As a result, there’s often a delay between when states receive their federal shipments of vaccines and when they get all the shots into people’s arms.
Bloomberg: Since the start of the global vaccination campaign, countries have experienced unequal access to vaccines and varying degrees of efficiency in getting shots into people’s arms.
NBC News: The recently approved Covid-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is opening up a menu of new ways to get shots into arms …
The Hill: Public health education is the best way to get COVID shots in arms
ABC News scores a hat trick:
Georgia officials have disputed the CDC data for weeks and said some health providers are slow to report when they put shots in arms.
“The supply chain is caught up. They don’t need to be doing that any more. They need to get shots in arms.”
The U.S. government needs to boost vaccine supplies if it wants New Mexico to meet a new mandate for getting at least one shot into the arms of all teachers by the end of March …
What’s the deal? I mean, why not just say shots or injections and be done with it? Why specify in arms? I’m sick of it.
If George Carlin were alive today, he would spin this annoying turn of phrase into a ten-minute comedy routine. Arms have become a bizarre, national fixation. A fetish perhaps imported from Italy. Or somewhere in Asia. Rejected feet no longer feel sexy.
See, every time I hear “shots in arms” I immediately remember a time I got a shot somewhere else entirely.
While working construction at a power plant, a worker assigned to my area contracted hepatitis. Anyone using the nearby drinking water barrel might have been exposed. So they loaded 50 sweaty construction workers onto trucks, drove us into the nearest Georgia town, and lined us up behind a small, red-brick doctor’s office for some minty fresh immune globulin. One by one, the men emerged from the back door rubbing their butts and laughing.
When it was my turn after many before me, I stepped into a small room where sat a tiny, grim-faced nurse with a syringe. She looked up and like a peeved Holly Hunter said, “I need a hip.”
Ho-kay. God knows what those men before me said to the woman.
Lately that memory is like an ear worm. Reporters and public health spokespeople insist on repeating “in arms” as though they are federally mandated to remind Americans into just what body part their Covid-19 vaccine will go.
Just drop it, okay? No, not the pants.