Gratitude and Grief: My COVID-19 Vaccine Story

Last week, on Thursday morning, I received my first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. It was last week Monday that the State of Florida opened eligibility to all adults. I had tried using the online scheduling tools with Publix and CVS but found all available appointments claimed while I was in those systems’ virtual waiting rooms. But then I was scrolling through Twitter on Tuesday evening and saw some information about a walk-up (no appointment needed) site operated by the Florida Department of Health just 20 minutes’ walk from home. So that’s where I found myself on Thursday morning, one of the first 50 people in line a little over an hour before scheduled opening, with podcasts and playlists to pass the time.

The site was a little delayed in admitting the first patients that morning due to not having an EMS unit on site at the scheduled start time, but once the ambulance rolled up and parked, they opened the gates and I was inside perhaps five minutes later. I was verbally screened for any symptoms, allergies, or other recent vaccinations, and directed to a vaccination station. I was asked which arm I preferred for the injection site (being right-handed, I chose my left), verified that the printed label for my vaccination record card had my name and date of birth correct, rolled up my sleeve, and was injected with the vaccine.

I was directed across the room to the observation area, where I sat in a chair between two pieces of Plexiglas, to wait the requisite 15 minutes in case of any adverse reaction.

And it was there I quietly started sobbing, overwhelmed with both gratitude and grief.

Gratitude for the uncountable and mostly unnamed people who made the events of the last few minutes possible. Researchers and their support teams. Clinical trial participants. Manufacturing plant line workers. Truck drivers and other logistics personnel. The medical staff and volunteers at the vaccination site.

And more broadly, gratitude that Naomi and I stayed healthy through the first thirteen months of this pandemic (Naomi has been fully vaccinated, by the way), that our employers took care of us, and that we live in a day and age when we have the technology both to create vaccines with historic speed and historic efficacy and also to maintain many of the other aspects of our lives through virtual means.

But also grief. Grief for the nearly three million people around the world who lost their lives to this terrible disease, their millions of family members, and the untold millions more who were infected. Those numbers are staggering, and I am not sure we will ever really be able to count in any precise way the losses sustained during this pandemic, whether human, economic, or otherwise.

And we also probably will never, with any precision, be able to count how much was avoidable, though I know without a shadow of a doubt that it did not have to be this bad. And one other thing is clear to me from the past year. As a society, we have to take better care of each other. We have to see the humanity in each other and let that be the driver of our engagement with the world around us, rather than an unquenchable thirst for power and wealth. Of all the things that should not cause fellow human beings to fight each other, healing the sick would top my list. There will be other plagues, literally and figuratively, in our future. And God willing we will find the literal or figurative vaccines for them. But in the meantime, perhaps we can also find ways to rebuild and restore our communities in ways that allow us to see each other – whether through screens or otherwise – as teammates rather than opponents, as colleagues rather than competitors, as friends rather than enemies.