New York, USA, New York, USA, New York, New York, New Stephanie Cal chained Christmas decorations to her family home on Long Island on December 13 when she won a message from a colleague at the hospital.
The 58-year-old nurse looked at her phone: she had qualified for the first circular of Pfizer-BioNtech’s COVID-19 vaccine. A few days earlier, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration has not been able to do so. But it’s not the first time He had given the go-ahead to the pharmaceutical giant’s vaccine for emergency distribution.
“This is the Christmas present,” said Cal, intensive care surgical nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in the New York metropolitan area.
The next morning, Cal rolled up his way to get the vaccine on his shift at Queens Medical Center.
She is the third American to be inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine.
“I feel it’s the right thing to do, ” said Cal. ” It’s hope in a small jar. “
This spring, Cal’s emergency unit was a morgue. Dozens of his own patients were carried in frame bags.
“One by one, our unit was full of emergency room COVID patients,” he says. “The hospital has been unrecognizable. “
While other people fell into death, Cal grabbed their hand or played their favorite music and told them they were not alone. Their beds were moved through a new patient in an hour, he said.
“On the one hand, I can tell those I took care of who survived,” he recalls. “It’s amazing that they’re all gone. “
Stephanie Cal is one of more than 2 million Americans who have been vaccinated in the run-up to 2021 [Courtesy of Northwell Health] Nearly a year later, the trauma persists. The cry of unanswered cell phones echoing in your emergency unit. beside the bedside of intubated and dying patients, pursues her, he said.
“They were absolutely sedated and medically paralyzed because their lungs were in such a poor condition,” he said. “However, those cell phones rang constantly because their circle of family and friends were looking for them and could not respond. “
The vaccine is a “blessing,” he added, and the first step toward normalcy. Cal plans to get his dose of the Pfizer vaccine in 3 weeks.
“I in science and I need us to live our lives again,” he said. “If I can show other people that it’s OKAY to do it and that I wasn’t afraid, then maybe I’m helping someone else feel the same way and perceive it. “
On December 18, Moderna, the Massachusetts biotechnology company, obtained emergency approval for its vaccine, which strengthened the launch of the vaccine in New York.
The arrival of two other vaccines has led to an increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths across the country. Nearly 1. 3 million new cases were reported in the following week alone, bringing the total number of infected Americans to more than 19 million, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Globally, fears of a new variant of the virus have led Europe to new blockades as nations around the world began to fight for vaccines.
However, vaccines have been a ray of hope for new York City’s fitness, which this year has experienced some of the darkest chapters in the city’s history. More than 25,000 New Yorkers died when the virus spread throughout the city.
“I feel defeated every day when I left my homework,” Dr. Adam Berman, 37, told Al Jazeera. Situation.
Berman was in the trenches the first wave of the pandemic. The Manhattan doctor treated a lot of inflamed patients and compared contagion to a “nuclear bomb. “Berman was vaccinated on December 14. Getting vaccinated, he said, was like “coming back from the war. “
“I’m proud to be a New Yorker. I think we’ve gone from some of the darkest moments this city has ever had in fashion history to taking it to a milestone,” he said.
Dr Adam Berman won the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine this month [Dorian Geiger / Al Jazeera] Berman said he believed the federal government’s overall reaction to the virus had been “catastrophic. “He believes President Donald Trump has endangered the lives of millions of people. people through minimizing the virus.
“This country may not even admit at the highest point that it is a problem. The message is horrible.
He was pleased to see President-elect Joe Biden vaccinated on live television on December 21.
However, Berman fears that the worst has already happened. Thousands of more New Yorkers are likely to die in the coming months. Vaccines are not a change, he warned.
“There’s a soft one at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel is very long,” Berman said. “Our lives would probably never be exactly the same as before. “
All this has happened before. In 1947, Eugene LeBar, a carpet merchant from Maine, took a bus from Mexico City to New York, stumbled upon Manhattan with a fever and died of smallpox a few days later. Authorities, fearing a fatal epidemic, vaccinated millions more people. in weeks not since smallpox, the city has been forced to launch such a vaccination crusade, until now.
In recent weeks of 2020, more than 67,000 New Yorkers, and more than 2. 1 million Americans, were vaccinated against COVID.
“This is the weapon that will end the war,” said New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, this month while watching the first vaccinations.
Approximately 140,000 vaccines, of nearly one million doses available, were administered state-round, the governor’s workplace said.
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio praised the moment as a “hopeful move” on December 14, and promised that vaccines would be “safe, loose, and easy to get” for the city’s 8 million residents.
However, vaccinating the masses of cultural, racial, ethnic and socioeconomic origin is an astonishing task, some experts said.
“This will be an unprecedented mass immunization scenario: we are in the midst of a pandemic,” said Dr. Bruce Y Lee, a vaccine chain expert and professor of policy and fitness control at New York University’s School of Public Health. a huge city with so many other parts and people. “
The Jewish Medical Center on Long Island, Queens, the site of the first vaccines in the United States [Dorian Geiger / Al Jazeera] Lee estimated that between 70 and 80% of the population of New York City would want to be vaccinated to “extinguish” the risk of the virus.
“Even if many other people are vaccinated, it’s not the only thing that would possibly not prevent the pandemic,” he said. “You have to succeed in each and every neighborhood. “
Nurses, doctors, lifeguards andArray Hospital in New York City, as well as the fitness center and patients, will be vaccinated in January, authorities said. However, the hierarchy requires who will be vaccinated later, and how and when, is unclear.
Older people and staff who cannot move physically (teachers, taxi drivers, subway drivers, barbers, police officers, firefighters, postal staff, and day care staff) will be qualified, followed by those with at-risk medical conditions, according to the CDC recommendations.
Vaccines are expected to be available to the general population of the city until mid-2021. City officials have promised that vaccine deployment will prioritize and access to vaccines in neighborhoods most affected by coronavirus.
“We are now in an era where we have to wait,” Dr. Eric Toner, principal investigator at johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety, told Al Jazeera.
In reaction to a fitness pandemic, he described the coming months as “vaccine purgatory. “
“We are looking to find out when and where we will be vaccinated; it’s frustrating for other people not to have the answers to the questions,” he said. “It’s incredibly complicated. People will just have to. “be patient, for they have to be with so many other facets of this pandemic.
City fitness officials this week implemented initial plans for an “off-road” vaccination effort and suggested that the municipality volunteer on distribution issues at sites in the city, where vaccines will be administered.
“The Department of Health has several thousand people who have been trained in [distribution] operations and can make this historic effort,” Dr. Dave Chokshi, the city’s fitness commissioner, wrote in a letter to city leaders. “But we can’t do everything alone: we want you to be part of the staff and fully mobilize those [sites], so we can run a network of COVID-19 vaccine distribution sites in New York City on a large scale. “
Starting in January, vaccination sites will open in New York City municipal buildings, with a prospective ability to serve thousands of people a week.
The city also has the approval of more vaccines at the federal point in the coming months. Three other vaccines, by Johnson
December 22 – Dr. Anthony Fauci is preparing to get his first dose of the COVID vaccine in Bethesda, Maryland [Patrick Semansky-Pool/ Getty Images/ AFP] “If you want enough vaccine to vaccinate everyone else in the US, you’ll be vaccinated. But it’s not the first time I would like to vaccinate – up to 85% or more of the population – will want more than two companies,” Said Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s most sensible infectious disease specialist, on Monday.
The current combined national source of vaccines – 400 million doses – is enough to cover around 60% of the country’s 330 million inhabitants. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses consistent with compatible vaccines.
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have logistical limitations; both require additional injection, have a short lifespan and require under-zero garage situations.
The Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine is very fragile and is sent in boxes along a pizza weighing approximately 1000 doses, its vials, packaged in traditional boxes and insulated with dry ice, should be stored in special freezers from -60 to -80 degrees Celsius (-76 to -112 Fahrenheit). Once thawed and opened, doses should be given within a few hours. This, according to experts, greatly limits the scope of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
“They are only useful in a position that can vaccinate about 1,000 more people in a day and is rarely too far from the freezer where they are stored,” Toner said. “If we want to vaccinate the vast majority of the population, we want to introduce them to medical offices, emergency care centers, clinics and neighborhood pharmacies. This won’t be imaginable until we get a vaccine that’s much less difficult to care for than the first two. “
Moderna’s vaccine, while requiring prolonged maintenance at below-zero temperatures, is not as fragile as the Pfizer vaccine. Stays solid at -20 degrees Celsius for up to six months or in refrigerated situations for up to 30 days; at room temperature lasts 12 hours, is best suited for rural areas and farthest from the country.
The Johnson Vaccine
“The more vaccines we can get, the more people will be able to get vaccines, the faster it will really end,” said Jamie Piekarski, a nurse at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan.
Piekarski won the Pfizer vaccine on December 15. Her grandmother died this spring after the virus went through her nursing home in Connecticut. There’s no funeral.
“We couldn’t be there to say goodbye,” recalls Piekarski, 31. “It’s hard not to be with the other people you love when they’re suffering like this. “
Jamie Piekarski, a 31-year-old nurse practitioner, won the Pfizer and BioNtech vaccine on December 15 [Courtesy of the Mount Sinai Health System] The Brooklyn nurse practitioner said she was about to get vaccinated first.
“At first, I had an initial hesitation because it’s something new, it’s a new vaccine,” he said.
However, in recent months, it has monitored vaccine trials and studies, both vaccines, using artificial messenger ribonucleic acid (mNS) technology, have proven to be 95% effective against COVID. Piekarski nevertheless made the decision that she had the “responsibility” to be vaccinated.
“The brightest minds in the world have worked meticulously on this,” he said. “The benefits outweigh the risks. “
Piekarski had no unsightly effect other than pain in his arm, he said.
“It’s like a little pinch. Then I went back to work, I had no problems. My arm hurts a little bit, but nothing prevents me from doing what I have to do. It’s pretty benign.
The health government has been investigating part of a dozen allergic reactions related to the Pfizer vaccine, thousands of vaccines, since the start of deployment across the country.
On December 24, a Boston oncologist with a crustacean allergy experienced one of the first known allergic reactions to the Moderna vaccine and was discharged the same day after receiving a remedy with his own ear style, according to hospital officials.
People with a history of anaphylaxis will likely revel in side effects, the fitness government warned.
Several thousand other people vaccinated in the middle of the month also experienced a lower “health effect on events,” according to the CDC. Some others were unable to work, do other daily activities, or require medical attention. which included nausea, dizziness or headaches, disappear regularly in a day and are a manifestation of the body’s powerful immune reaction to the vaccine, medical experts said.
Nationally, nearly 340,000 more people have died from the virus, according to the CDC. However, a significant number of Americans are reluctant to roll up and get vaccinated.
African-Americans, who have suffered alarming infections and pandemic mortality rates in New York and across the country, are especially cautious.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos vote this month, only 49% of black Americans said they planned to get vaccinated, 63 percent of white Americans and 61 percent of Latinos.
The lack of black participants in vaccine trials and public aptitude personalities, traditionally unresolved racial disparities in medicine, and a serious lack of confidence in the public fitness formula have contributed to skepticism about vaccines in many American communities of color, some experts say.
COVID has toured the black and Latino communities of New York. Mortality rates were 15 times higher in some communities of color than in some predominantly white neighborhoods [Dorian Geiger / Al Jazeera] “This mistrust is genuine because of the disparities we are seeing today,” said Virginia C Fields, founder and executive director of the National Black Health Leadership Commission.
For 40 years, the federal government has experimented with heaps of black men in Alabama who had contracted syphilis without their informed consent, but were not given attention or remedy. Many have died or gone blind or crazy. Tukegee’s experiments, as they are known, were interrupted in the 1970s following widespread condemnation. However, such atrocities, as well as persistent racial disparities in medicine, have sown serious generational mistrust in federal fitness projects. among black Americans.
“The other blacks are disproportionately affected by diseases that make them more vulnerable to COVID,” Fields added. “Very little has been done to prevent these conditions. “
At the height of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, Manhattan’s wealthy white communities, such as Gramercy Park, recorded 31 deaths consisting of 100,000 city dwellers, according to data. The Latino community, about an hour by subway, recorded 444 deaths consistent with 100,000 residents.
Fields, a former Manhattan district president, said her organization would work heavily with black civic teams, leaders, tenant teams, and city officials to magnify vaccine data and convince black New Yorkers to vacuse.
“Education is for this period,” Fields said. “We have to have boots on the ground. We will involve people, block by block, construction to construction. “
If the city’s mass vaccination crusade fails, a recent bill filed with the state Senate may make the vaccination law mandatory, unless there is evidence of a medical exemption. neighboring counties.
This spring, Arlene Ramirez’s entire family circle was affected by the coronavirus. The cough suits were so brutal, said the 44-year-old Queens nurse, who imagined her own death.
“It’s two weeks of hell. I’m afraid for my life.
In April, his elderly father, a retired jeweler, died of COVID. The 82-year-old spent 36 days in intensive care before being eliminated from the resuscitation system.
“He fought a very strong fight, ” said Ramirez.
Ramirez, one of the first New Yorkers to get the Moderna vaccine, received the image on December 21.
Despite any immunity her body may have evolved as a result of her war with the virus, the 44-year-old woman still chose to be vaccinated as a precaution.
“I’m not going to let COVID win the war against my life,” he said. “We don’t know what this immunity means to my body. I don’t need to die and I don’t need to go through this. “never again. “
When Ramirez looked at the needle before this month, he had an idea of his father.
“The message is clear, don’t be afraid of the vaccine,” Ramirez said, “we’ll have to be afraid of COVID. “
Questions remain about who is essential and to determine the work of vaccine candidates, increasing the threat of fraud.
The plan for a fair distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine in the long run is not perfect, but possibly that’s all we have.
Ethnic minorities are maximum, but are underrepresented in the search for a solution.
As countries rush to unload vaccines, the WHO-led Covax allocation is seen as a short delay.