Hospital Clinicians Receive First Vaccinations, as Pfizer Vaccine Rolls Out Nationwide
On December 14, Sandra Lindsay, R.N., a critical care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, New York, part of the Northwell Health system, became the face of healthcare to millions of Americans, as she became the first clinician in New York state, and the first American, to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Monday morning, just three days after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the terms of emergency use authorization.
As the Washington Post’s Ben Guarino and William Wan wrote, in an article entitled, “Why this New York nurse got the country’s first coronavirus shot: ‘We were scared,’” “It was fitting for so many reasons that Sandra Lindsay became the face of the country’s first coronavirus vaccinations Monday. With the coronavirus killing people of color at disproportionate rates, she was a Black woman eager to prove the shot’s safety to those still hesitant about being vaccinated. She is a critical-care nurse, among the health-care workers who have spent more time than any caring for the pandemic’s sickest victims — working at a New York hospital system that was on the front lines of the pandemic this spring and has treated thousands of covid-19 patients. But what made Lindsay an especially poignant choice, her brother said, was that she had dreamed her whole life — since a 6-year-old in their home country of Jamaica — of finding a way to help others. ‘This is the whole reason she became a nurse, especially growing up in a third-world country like we did. She’s so passionate about people’s health,’ said her brother, Garfield Lindsay. ‘To be able to be an example like this for getting the vaccine, it’s so meaningful.’”
The Post’s reporters added that, “In an interview shortly after the vaccination, Lindsay said she knew when she woke up Monday morning she would be getting the shot but had no idea she would be the first person in America to do so since the vaccine’s approval this weekend, according to Northwell Health, the New York-area medical system where Lindsay works. It said she was the first American to receive the vaccine.”
On Monday evening, on the MSNBC program “The Reid Report,” Lindsay told host Joy Reid that she was also very conscious of being a Black woman and being the first to receive the vaccine, because of the longtime concern among Black Americans over anything that smacks of medical experimentation, given such historical horrors as the Tuskegee Experiment that was conducted by the United States Publican Health Service from 1932 to 1972.
The Post’s Guarino and Wan noted in their report that “Northwell, which operates 23 hospitals, is prioritizing its medical staff based on a variety of factors, including their jobs. As an intensive care unit director at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Lindsay, 52, oversees five units of critical-care nurses who have been caring for covid-19 patients since the worst weeks in New York this spring. Amid that work, Lindsay lost an aunt and an uncle to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.” “We were scared,” she told the Post reporters, referring to the early days of the pandemic. “I had to remain numb sometimes and push forward.”
The New York Times’s Jack Healy, Lucy Tompkins, and Audra D.S. Burch followed several physicians in North Dakota, Kansas, Ohio, Florida, and New Mexico, as they got vaccinated on Monday, in an article entitled “’A Shot of Hope’: What the Vaccine Is Like for Frontline Doctors and Nurses.”
They wrote, “As Dr. Rishi Seth rolled up his left sleeve on Monday to receive one of the United States’ first Covid-19 vaccines, he thought of his patients back in the Special Care Unit. There was the Uber driver who had walked out of the hospital after being on a ventilator. The dying father who said goodbye to his two college-age daughters on a video chat. The four coronavirus patients Dr. Seth had treated just on Monday morning, checking their oxygen levels and reviewing treatment plans before he stripped off his protective gear and joined a first wave of health care workers to get vaccinated in hospitals across the country. ‘That’s why today is so emotional,’ said Dr. Seth, an internal-medicine physician with Sanford Health in North Dakota, a state that has been ravaged by the virus. ‘You’re still fighting a battle, but you’re starting to see the horizon.’” And, they noted, “Monday’s vaccinations, the first in a staggeringly complicated national campaign, were a moment infused with hope and pain for hundreds of America’s health care workers. Even as doctors and nurses lined up for the first shots, cheered on their colleagues and joked about barely feeling the prick of the syringe, they also reflected on their grueling months in the trenches of the country’s coronavirus nightmare,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times’s Luke Money, Colleen Shalby, and Maura Dolan, covering developments in Los Angeles, wrote in an article entitled “COVID-19 vaccinations begin in California as L.A. healthcare workers among first to get dose,” wrote that “Five healthcare workers at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Hollywood were among the first Californians to get the COVID-19 vaccine Monday, ushering in a new phase of a pandemic that has killed more than 21,000 people in the state and shattered the economy. Gov. Gavin Newsom, state Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis were on hand as the county’s first workers got their shots, the beginning of what will be a long campaign to vaccinate California, starting with front-line healthcare workers. One by one, the Kaiser employees sat inside a conference room that had been turned into a vaccination center. Newsom asked each about their line of work before the shots were administered. Cheers broke out from nearby masked observers after each vaccination.” Among those vaccinated first, they reported, were “Helen Cordova, a nurse in the intensive care unit and the first healthcare worker at the facility to receive the vaccine”; pharmacy supervisor David Cheng; Kim Taylor, an ED nurse, and Brian Thompson, M.D., an emergency physician. They noted that “Thompson, 61, was born at the Kaiser hospital in Los Angeles where he has worked since 1988. He was raised in South Los Angeles, a community that has been hit hard by the virus in L.A. County.”
And in Miami, Miami Herald reporter Ben Cornack, in an article entitled “New ray of hope.’ First South Florida hospital workers get vaccinated in Broward,” wrote, “The first healthcare worker in the COVID-19 epicenter of South Florida received an injection on Monday afternoon from a vial carrying a new “ray of hope” — a vaccine with the potential to bring a roaring epidemic of death and severe illness to an end. The shot went into the left arm of Memorial Healthcare System critical care physician Aharon Sareli who could be seen smiling from behind his mask. Later, outside the pharmacy and in front of more than a dozen cameras, Sareli said it was an identical experience to receiving a flu vaccine. He said it was ‘really an honor to go first. Masks and social distancing were the only weapons we had up until this time,’ Sareli said. ‘But with the emergence of the [vaccines], we really stand a chance to change the trajectory of this virus.’”
Cornack added that, “Before Sareli received his shot, top leaders at Memorial Healthcare system, South Broward’s public hospital network, gathered for a press conference outside their specialty pharmacy in Miramar on Monday afternoon. At the other end of the parking lot, a FedEx truck just hours earlier had delivered 19,500 doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine that could jump-start the U.S. down a path toward bringing the pandemic to a near-halt by summer next year. ‘Today there is a ray of hope that is new for us, for our clinical front line caregivers that are battling this COVID-19 pandemic,’ said Maggie Hansen, Memorial’s chief nursing executive. ‘It has been very taxing for them, professionally and personally, for the last nine months.’”
On Monday evening, on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour,” Debbie Ford, R.N., the chief nursing officer at Ochsner Health in New Orleans, told host Brian Williams that, “To know that we’ve been on this marathon for the last nine months… and for now, to finally be able to start the beginning of ending this crisis, was very emotional for us.” She added that “I would like to encourage everyone tog et the vaccine. I just feel this deep sense of hope that we can eradicate this, we can spend time with our loved ones and not limit our time. As a chief nurse executive is, let’s protect ourselves, to take care of the communities we are privileged to serve, and then I ask the community to protect themselves, as we get to the end of this pandemic.”
Meanwhile, with regard to inpatient hospitalizations that had been peaking in the past few weeks in New Orleans, but that have begun to subside, Ford said that, “Right now, I’m just ecstatic. We’ve been able to discharge nearly 3,000 inpatients from our facility. And that’s just a great feeling to be part of that, and to know that we have fewer people having this disease. We’re on a different track, in terms of being able to save people.”
Miami cardiologist Juan Rivera, M.D., a medical consultant to the Spanish-language Univision network, told Univision reporter Lourdes del Río on Monday evening that it will be very important for clinicians to demonstrate the safety of the vaccine by being publicly vaccinated. Also on Monday evening, Ilan Shapiro, M.D., medical director of medical education and wellness at AltaMed Health Services in Los Angeles, told Univision’s San Francisco correspondent, Luis Megid, that it remains very important for now for Americans to continue to wear masks.
That sentiment was echoed by Laurie Garrett, the highly respected journalist and author, who has studied bacteriology and immunology, and whose bestselling books include the 1995 The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, and the 2003 Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, told Brian Williams on “The 11th Hour,” that “What’s disturbing is that people are already referring to the pandemic in the past tense, as though it’s in the rearview mirror. And if people lighten up on their self-protection in way—if they stop wearing masks or socially distancing and especially if they travel for Christmas, we’re going to see a horrible result,” health journalist and renowned author Laurie Garrett told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday night, on his program “The Last Word.” “We need more studies to find out the answers” to the questions around the duration of the protection of the Pfizer vaccine and the others about to be approved, and on disease spread issues that are still until entirely understood even now. “In the meantime,” she said, “wear a mask.”
