No free immunizations during pertussis outbreak in county

MY county is having a pertussis outbreak alert. There have been a number of confirmed cases and the schools in the county are not sending children on any events to other schools. All field trips and sports competitions with other schools have been cancelled.

Since my children have not been immunized against pertussis, I called the health dept to find out about the vaccine. I'm not so much worried about them, but thought that I might as well, that the shot would probably not hurt them at this point and it would be a community health type thing to do.

The woman at the health dept was in no way helpful, I guess she doesn't have to worry about customer satisfaction since she works for the county. I was totally surprised to find out that the vaccine is not free! I thought they would be heavily recruiting and encouraging the public to get immunized against this in the face of this outbreak. Many people opted out of the pertussis vaccine and only got their kids the Diphtheria/Tetanus one.

She told me that they got the vaccines for free but they had to charge something to help cover the cost of the nurse giving it, so it's a minimum of $5 on up to $35 depending on income. I told her that I thought that was ridiculous, to forget it. She acted like she couldn't care less.