I’m 26, walk three miles a day, have no underlying conditions, and I’m not an essential front-line worker – but I’ve just got the coveted COVID-19 vaccine. Do you ask how it happened? Yes, so do I.
As I sit in the foyer of a Brooklyn clinic Friday waiting for my appointment with the coronavirus test, I hear a man quietly talking to someone on the other side of the door. “We have one more dose left – is there anyone in the building who wants it?”
I jumped up and shouted, “I!”
He turned and looked at me, nodded and led me upstairs to a room with a cloth screen and a folding table. A nurse then went through me by filling out an online registration and a double-sided paper form before I offered more information. I would get the Moderna vaccine, the last dose from their last vial of the day.
Of course, I took the opportunity to take it in front of the elderly and other vulnerable groups – it would have gone in the trash if I had not done so. In evidence of the failure of U.S. supply chains – the vaccine explosion was so sloppy – I suspect situations like mine are not uncommon at all.
The reason they offered it to me was because the health worker he was destined for missed their appointment, the 10-dose vial had only six hours of shelf life and they were about to close for the day. No, the nurse had not yet heard from that man in a DC supermarket what had happened. No, there was no one more vulnerable to COVID than me via a waiting list to take it – there was no one else available, period.
It was my arm or the garbage.
I’m behind the scenes and greet another nurse, who makes me roll up my sleeve as she loads the syringe. I told her I feel dizzy with excitement, overcome with gratitude, and that this experience reminds me of the haunting play “Sleep No More,” which is outside the Broadway series, in which actors drag audiences away in other rooms for private performances that felt secret. . She was not familiar with the show, but she understood how I felt at that moment: Here behind the curtain, at the point of vaccination of this deadly disease that has changed society forever and still destroys humanity, many people broke down and cried, she said. They, too, were overcome with gratitude.
She sticks the needle in my arm.
I kept chatting about the pandemic, how grateful I was for this moment, how historic it felt. She listens and nods, sending me to sit in a chair at the entrance of the room while we wait 15 minutes to make sure I have no immediate adverse reactions.
I’re sending the news to my family group chat when the first nurse gives me a card with my name and date on it and tells me to bring it when I get back – to this place or another one, no matter – to get my second Moderna shot within a month.
“You saved the dose,” she said as I went upstairs.
I breathlessly thanked everyone I passed on my way out of the building and jumped home, feeling more like I had just experienced an interactive theater than medical protocol.
A series of conflicting policies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and states make what to do with extra vaccines unclear and a controversial, acceptable violation. The FDA’s formal policy warns: “Discard the vial after 6 hours. Do not freeze again. So those nurses were probably expected to throw my shot away rather than use it to inoculate my demographically suitable life.
There is absolutely no reason why I should be vaccinated in front of my grandparents with a lack of immune system. They are patient as they anxiously wait their turn to get the vaccine, and there is also no reason why doses should be discarded or unused. The deployment of American vaccines was a disgrace, but did we really expect that there would be anything else to ward off this pandemic, which in the US has been defined as much by the new virus as by the impact of government failure on individuals?
Rep. For government Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Meanwhile, a NYC Health + Hospitals spokesman told The Post that he ‘follows all guidelines regarding the’ end of day ‘dose. Your experience matches the guidance propagated by the state. ”
When the coronavirus was first caught in New York, it received support for essential workers and frontline workers: flowers appeared on mortuary trucks with hand-painted rainbows and thanked nurses; the city came out at 19:00 to strike in a loud gratitude on pans.
As the other side of this disease increasingly comes into focus, it is again health workers who personally carry the heaviest: by making the difficult decision to follow federal guidelines and following a dose or following their gut and possibly a life.