The Georgia city that was once one of the most severely affected COVID-19 hotspots in the world received its first virus vaccinations Thursday.
While officials at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany say that’s an obvious reason for hope, they know convincing the community to get the vaccine will be a challenge.
A solarium at the side of the hospital was set up with a number of vaccination stations plus a partition where the vaccinated would wait for any immediate adverse reactions. First in line for one of the estimated 6,000 doses of the vaccine in the first shipment to Phoebe Putney was Dr. James Black, head of emergency medicine at the hospital.
Black was not alone. A gallery of hospital staff and media watched on. Nurse Brittany Pine prepared the vaccine, drawing a small amount into a syringe. Visually, if the act of the needle hitting Dr. Black’s shoulder was anticlimactic, the importance of it still carried weight. The room broke into cheers.
Phoebe Putney CEO Scott Steiner said in keeping with CDC guidelines, front-line health care workers at the hospital such as Black will be the first to receive the vaccine in Albany. Then come other hospital workers, broken into tiers of exposure risk. Then, said Steiner, police, firefighters and teachers are next in line.
“And by the first quarter, possibly, you know, everyone in the community,” Steiner said.
That would mean Albany and Dougherty County would be inoculated almost a year after a pair of funerals kicked off communitywide transmission that placed the city, along with parts of northern Italy and Wuhan, China, in the top tier of COVID-19 hotspots by late spring 2020.
“So I think we're being optimistic,” Steiner said. “We want to give people that hope because there's been a lot of sorrow and heartbreak and worry.”
Much of the heartbreak stems from the lesson the nation learned in no small part from watching Albany: Black people have died at much higher rates from the virus compared to other groups.
Meanwhile, infection rates are increasing again in southwest Georgia after a lull that followed the spike in the spring.
Black, who volunteered to publicly take the first dose in the city, said to meet that goal, health care workers will have to change the minds of people who, for very good historical reasons, are less than trustful of the medical establishment.
“People bring up things like the Tuskegee experiment,” Black said. In that decades-spanning experiment, black men were allowed to suffer for years with syphilis — sometimes were killed by it — just so doctors could watch the disease take its full course.
“And then it's going to take people ... it’s going to take time,” Black said. "It's not going to be a magic thing where people in America are going to forgive and forget."
So Black said he continues to field emails and phone calls, even requests to speak in public, about the vaccine. It’s why he said there was never any question he would be the first to receive the vaccine in the city. His message: the vaccine is safe.
“I choose to think of this as an amazing accomplishment and it shows what people can do when we band together,” Black said.
Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital will be collaborating with Georgia’s Department of Public Health on communitywide rollout of the vaccine after the turn of the year.
