HJNO Jan/Feb 2021

36 JAN / FEB 2021 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS LDH CORNER healthcare workers and nursing home workers would be prioritized, and we didn’t know when the vaccine would get here. What we did know, however, was that the public health benefit would be enormous, limited only by our ability to effectively dis- tribute it and the degree to which the public held confidence in its safety and efficacy. That’s why we did mass vaccination exercises using the flu vaccine, employing drive-thru clinics throughout the state to vaccinate nearly 5,000 people. The drive- thru setup worked well: it allowed us to socially distance, it was convenient and it provided the opportunity for a “dress rehearsal” for the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes more widely available. The Louisiana Department of Health has always been an aspirational agency, a place messenger RNA therapeutics bore fruit and gave us a safe and effective vaccine. When the data from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine was released in early December, The NewYork Times wrote that it offered a “glim- mer of hope” to ending the virus, and The Washington Post reported on people burst- ing into tears when they saw trucks rolling out of Pfizer’s Michigan facility. What many people didn’t see before the vaccines ar- rived was the massive amount of planning LDH undertook to prepare for the arrival. We started our vaccine planning in the spring, and after we submitted our vaccine playbook to the federal government in Oc- tober, we began receiving recognition for the quality and the forethought that went into the document. At the time, there was much we did not know – we didn’t know WHEN I became the first person at the Lou- isiana Department of Health (LDH) to get the COVID-19 vaccine, people were un- derstandably curious – about my immune reaction after getting the vaccine, about the sense of relief that I had knowing I re- ceived effective prevention, about what I was thinking when I got it. As I wrote on social media shortly af- ter being vaccinated, my first thought was about my 20-month-old daughter. She is growing up in an extraordinary time, and I know that when she gets older, she will ask what it was like to be on the front lines of Louisiana’s response to a global pandem- ic. I am sure that when that time comes, I’ll tell her that it started to feel like things were turning around in the ninth month of the pandemic, when decades of research into COLUMN LDH CORNER ‘A GLIMMER OF HOPE’ AFTER A DARK 2020