Ochsner Medical Center in Jefferson received one of the first shipments of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine in Louisiana on Monday. And on Tuesday, LCMC Health’s University Medical Center (UMC) in New Orleans received a shipment and began immunizing employees at highest risk for contracting the virus.
“This is a historic day for LCMC Health,” Dr. John Heaton, LCMC president said during a press conference at UMC. “Our healthcare workers have been fighting this pandemic for the last nine months, looking forward to the day when there was a way out. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and that light is this vaccine.”
Denise Friloux, a staff nurse in UMC’s employee health department, echoed Heaton after injecting LCMC’s first group of frontline workers.
“We’ve been waiting for this healing [for] a long time and this morning we’re beginning our journey toward that path to healing,” Friloux said.
Among the first to receive shots were New Orleans Health Director Dr. Jennifer Avegno and Louisiana’s Interim Assistant Secretary of Public Health Dr. Joseph Kanter, both emergency physicians. They proudly showed off their vaccination cards after receiving the Pfizer shot.
“It’s emotional on personal and professional levels. I’m honored to be a frontline healthcare worker in an emergency capacity, so I’m honored to be in the first priority group,” Avegno said after receiving the shot.
Also vaccinated were Sanjay Raman, an emergency registered nurse at Children’s Hospital, diet clerk Harold Jay Smith, and custodian Kim Alveris.
Alveris, who contracted COVID-19 earlier this year and teared up after receiving the vaccine, said, “I was emotional, but I wasn’t scared.”
As an environment services employee, Alveris cleans the rooms of patients infected with COVID-19. She said she put any fears about the vaccine aside to do her work.
“This is my job and it’s about the patients — cleaning their rooms and having [them] sanitized where they can get better. I didn’t have any fear because this is what I put in for,” Alveris said.
Smith, 23, said he chose to be one of the first hospital employees to be vaccinated in order to protect his mother and grandmother, whom he sees daily. He said he feels like he is a part of history.
“It’s weirdly exciting,” Smith said. “Like, wow! I was one of the first ones.”
Pfizer’s vaccine has not been approved for use in children yet. Raman said he stepped up to get the vaccine to protect the little ones.
“The biggest thing other than my own health is the health and safety of all the what we call superheroes of the city. The kids of the city, the patients at Children’s Hospital, as well as my own Superhero at home,” Raman said. “I have a 3-year-old son. My biggest goal is to protect him from this.”
He added that the prick from the needle was less painless than the flu shot he recently received.
“It didn’t hurt one bit,” Raman said. “Needles scare me. I’m not a big fan of shots, just like anybody else.”
Dr. Katherine Baumgarten, medical director of infection control and prevention at Ochsner Health, was one of the first to be vaccinated at Ochsner Medical Center on Monday. A day later, she said she was experiencing some soreness when she pressed on the spot where she was injected.
“I was actually kind of happy about that. That means I know that it’s there, that it’s working, that I’m having a response to it,” Baumgarten said.
Ochsner Health vaccinated approximately 250 frontline healthcare workers in Louisiana and Mississippi. Baumgarten said that more than 2,000 of the health system’s workers have made appointments to be immunized by the end of next week.
Baumgarten said she and the other frontline healthcare workers she has spoken to are feeling hopeful.
“I feel relief, I feel hope, I feel joy that there is some hopefully curtailing of this pandemic and hopefully some end in sight,” Baumgarten said.
Still, in his speech on Tuesday, Heaton briefly cautioned that the worst is not behind us yet.
“We know that this is liable to get worse before it gets better,” Heaton said.
Baumgarten said that over the weekend more patients were admitted to Ochsner Medical Center with COVID-19-related complications than the facility saw on a given day during the second spike over the summer. She attributed the rise in hospitalizations to Thanksgiving gatherings, given that we are now more than two weeks past the holiday.
Avegno said that keeping the number of people infected with the virus low is imperative to vaccinating the public.
“If it’s continuing to rage and our healthcare systems are overwhelmed, we’re not also going to have the bandwidth to go out and vaccinate everyone,” she said.
In a press conference last week, she warned New Orleanians that if the percent positivity rate in the city stayed above 5 percent, restrictions that include banning indoor service at bars would fall into place. She said she is “cautiously optimistic” that the city will not have to reinstate those restrictions. We will learn the new percent positivity rate and about those potential restrictions on Wednesday.
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