Dr. Nonye Imo isn’t exactly the one to get emotional. But when the nurse administering the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine told her she’d feel just “a little injection of hope”, that emotional dam faltered.
“I was unprepared for how relieved I would feel,” said the 26-year-old who is in her first-year residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. An OB-GYN, Imo was among the first batch of people to receive the vaccine as she’s constantly meeting with patients.
“Honestly, it hit home because you just don’t realize how much stress you’re under but this vaccine is kind of the first step toward things getting back to somewhat normal,” she explained.
Dr. Imo minutes after she received Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine.
So far, the U.S. government and the Food and Drugs Administration have OK’d two covid-19 vaccines, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s, which are now being rolled out nationwide with plans to administer them to 100 million Americans by next March. Priority groups are to receive the first batches of the vaccine in a process that will inevitably require gargantuan efforts of coordination and implementation in a massive almost war-like scale.
For second-year medical school student Jaime Quirarte, it was like being part of history.
While medical students at University of Texas Health San Antonio were initially not designated to receive the vaccine in December, this changed and Quirarte, seeing as he was still in San Antonio, before heading back to his native El Paso, signed up.
“We knew were going to get a significant number of vaccines but the big announcement came to us December 11,” the 24-year-old said. “The injection itself was painless and there will be a follow-up injection 21 days after I got my first one.“
Vaccines usually take around four to five years to test and approve, let alone distribute, but the covid-19 vaccine is the result of thousands of work hours by teams throughout the world. However, even healthcare workers had more than just a dose of skepticism with the process.
“I think it’s very easy to feel hesitant about the vaccine — that it’s being rapidly developed and you wonder ‘What if I get those side effects’ but then I think after doing research and understanding how important it is for herd immunity and public health - not getting it would hurt public opinion and confidence in the vaccine,” Imo said.
Distrust of the vaccine is nothing new in an already strange 2020 and skepticism is warranted especially among communities of color who have been subject to terrible and damaging U.S. government experiments.
Quirarte was also no stranger to skepticism and even conspiracy theories although with his fellow colleagues, he’s confident that the vaccine has been deemed “safe and efficacious” through trials and different authorities and by actually studying the science behind it all.
Soon-to-be Dr. Jaime Quirarte receives the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine.
“I have talked to a few of y friends outside of the medical field who were hesitant to get or that are hesitant to get the vaccine,” Quirarte said. “I think [my colleagues and I] all have friends and family members who are at risk from covid-19 and the fact that we could get [the vaccine] just seemed like a step in the right direction to us.”
In the past few days, Imo and Quirarte both shared their “I got the vaccine” moment on Instagram. Think of it as an “I voted” sticker but with a band-aid included, a demonstration of hope and a sense of what lies ahead as we turn the page into 2021.
“I think it’s important to tell people ‘Hey, I did the research’ and I got the vaccine and you should, too,” Imo said. “I’m not going to force anyone to get this vaccine but I think it’s just being comfortable and opening myself up to any questions that anyone has about it.”
