VICTORIA — Frail Port Angeles senior Inez Cowan was all smiles Thursday as a Fort Street pharmacy nurse injected her with Canadian-made influenza vaccine.
Cowan, 88, was one of 20 who ventured across the border to get vaccinated in Canada, part of Carlsborg-based Royal Tours’ first “Flu Shot Tour.”
“I have to have it,” said Cowan, who wears a heart pacemaker and moves around with the aid of a walker.
The charter bus company, owned by Port Townsend businessman Kevin Harris, transported Sequim and Port Angeles residents and others from as far away as Poulsbo and Shelton to a Victoria pharmacy vaccine clinic Thursday.
They then took a 90-minute road tour of the Victoria area’s many cultural and historical attractions.
While rain drizzled on downtown Victoria, Cowan was escorted by her daughter, Peggy Schouviller of Shelton, who also was vaccinated at Victoria Compounding Pharmacy near Fort and Cook streets.
Schouviller decided to take her mother on the tour when all else failed at clinics in and around Port Angeles. The vaccine supply, she said, had dried up.
Victoria pharmacist Dr. John Forster-Coull reported Thursday morning that he had already served up to 200 Americans at his vaccination clinic this week — and still had 500 doses.
The U.S. supply of flu vaccine was slashed nearly in half earlier this month when Emeryville, Calif.-based Chiron Corp. was barred from shipping any of its production because of contamination at a plant in England.
The shortage has prompted officials to urge healthy Americans to forgo shots so there will be enough for those at risk of getting seriously ill from the flu.
That generally includes adults older than 65 and infants younger than 2 years, says the federal Centers for Disease Control.
Thursday’s Royal Tours vaccine run — which included the ferry MV Coho from and to Port Angeles — was a departure from the bus line’s normal two-hour Victoria trip, which takes riders around the provincial capital’s major sights, all the way to the Saanich Peninsula and Butchart Gardens.
While some aboard the 55-seat Royal Tours coach groused about having to travel so far to be vaccinated, the tour was not without its lighthearted moments.
“Everybody’s going to be prodded with a big needle!” joked Jimmy Gorst, a longtime Victoria tour guide, who was a partner in Royal Victoria Tours before he sold the bus line to Harris last summer.
Gorst, 82, has been assisting Harris in the bus tour line’s transition to new ownership, and he escorted the flu tour group from the bus to the bustling Fort Street pharmacy of cheerful Canadian pharmacists and clinic nurses.
“It’s a very, very small needle, I don’t care what Jimmy says,” countered tour bus driver Woody Woodruff, who after the clinic narrated an extensive but clinic-abbreviated tour.