With Watermelon Lemon Drops, Johnson & Johnson COVID Shots, New Orleans Vaccinated Coronavirus Vaccine

With patches on their arms and vaccination cards in hand, Shawn and Orey Blunt clinked glasses and dropped the festive watermelon-lemon drop shots.

This time the drink was the hunter to a different kind of shots.

“It did not hurt at all,” Orey said as she waited for the man to receive a Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine. Then, without skipping a beat, the two headed straight from the vaccination station in the neutral ground on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans to the Dragon’s Den bar.

At the Dragon’s Den’s Shots for Shots event, which is the most New Orleans way to convince people to get vaccinated.

They had 40 people sign up before the start of the event, and the line continues to grow. pic.twitter.com/EpGzNa9cRY

– Katelyn Umholtz (@ kumh0ltz) 10 April 2021

They were two of the more than 125 people attracted by the promise of free alcohol, as long as they were first vaccinated.

To the right of the couple, DJ RQ Away interrupts songs by Tyler, the Creator and me. Lauryn Hill to announce who is next in line for the vaccination. Most did not wait longer than 20 minutes.

The planner of the Shot for Shot event, DJ RQ Away, is no stranger to bringing public health initiatives among the people, usually at pubs or music salons, and aimed at younger people and minorities. Prior to the pandemic, he held opportunities with the CrescentCare Clinic to provide sexually transmitted disease testing to his guests at Tipitina.

Noted that the inequality in COVID-19 cases and the deployment of the vaccine among black people, coupled with his eagerness to see people and play music again, knew that his next project with CrescentCare would involve the shot.

“I can’t ask people to care more, but I can make it visible,” DJ RQ Away said. “My followers are mostly young people, black people and artists, and that’s what I do my opportunities for.”

Katie Conner, the COVID-19 vaccine manager at CrescentCare, said it’s important to get young people and people of color to come, that the opportunity is comfortable for them. And it should be absolutely ‘cool’.

“We wanted to bring the vaccines among the people, and making it cool definitely helps,” Conner said.

Therefore, they set up the vaccination station in front of a bar and planned that the event would start at 20:30. Not all 244 vaccines were used by 22:00.

But as expected, the crowd was overwhelmingly young. Some said they held out the shot – until alcohol was involved.

It was an ultimatum that Briggs Martin declared to his friends: he will not get a shot unless he gets another kind of shot as well.

“They called me a bluff,” Martin said, his free kick in one hand and a can of Miller High Life in the other. “It’s a good combination, though.”

Others came just about who would be at the event. In another way to attract younger guests, CrescentCare Qween Amor, a transgender activist and newly licensed EMT, was shot Friday night after being shot.

By 9:40 p.m., she said she had chopped at least 50 arms.

“I wanted to get my chance, and I did,” said Erin Street, an accountant. She was drinking beer on the sidewalk outside Dragon’s Den with Stacy Wall, a woman she met 30 minutes earlier while waiting in the vaccine line.

“This is New Orleans for you,” Street said.

Just as symbolic as the shot was for many people during the event, it was once again a way to New Orleans, almost back on its normal pulse.

It was also the first night since the pandemic that city officials extended the last call from 11pm to 1am, to be sure, but masks were still needed and capacity was still limited in Dragon’s Den.

“This is probably the most epic way of saying ‘f — you’ to COVID, ‘said Emma, ​​a graduate student who did not want to be named. She arrived before the start time at 20:30 to get her vaccine and shot. “It’s like a victory party.”

If New Orleanians missed the first Shot for Shot event, Kermit Ruffin’s Tremé-in-Law Lounge is hosting its own vaccination event on April 17 in the same style: One J&J shot, followed by one alcoholic shot.