Almost exactly nine months ago we ran a post about the COVID-19 pandemic. In that post, I explained why we were going to move forward with our “regular programming” during this unprecedented time. Since that time, I have really only mentioned the pandemic and its effects on my personal and professional life a few times on the podcast. That doesn't mean it hasn't had a dramatic effect on our lives.
Just for today, I wanted to pause our regular programming to give thanks for my early Christmas present. You see, two days ago, I received the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. I received my vaccine on the same day as the Vice President of the United States, currently the highest-ranking non-immune member of the government, and days before President-elect Biden. What an immense privilege!
I cannot help but tear up as my heart swells with an immense sense of gratitude. Many times over the last nine months I have been thanked for my service on the front lines of the pandemic. I have even been offered discounts and free donuts. However, there is no better “thank you” than allowing health care workers to the front of the vaccine line.
To the American (Moderna) and German (Pfizer/BionNTech) people:
- Thank you for funding the effort to rapidly develop, test, and distribute this vaccine with your precious tax dollars.
- Thank you to the millions who continue to wait in line for their turn to receive the vaccine. It is rolling out at such lightning speed I've no doubt it won't be long before all who desire to receive it will have access.
To the research staff at Pfizer/BioNTech and similar companies:
- Thank you for your countless hours of hard work and overtime and for your dedication to your craft.
To the FDA:
- Thank you for approving an emergency use authorization.
To Congress and the Trump Administration officials:
- Thank you for prioritizing the pursuit of this miracle. I put developing and distributing an effective vaccine to a global pandemic in less than a year on par with sending people to the moon, building twenty B-24 bombers a day, and the Human Genome Project in terms of our greatest government-funded technological accomplishments.
To those who volunteered for the vaccine trials:
- Thank you. Especially for those of you in the placebo arm!
To our local government authorities, hospital administrators, and physician leaders:
- Thank you for getting us the training and information we needed, the PPE, the negative air pressure rooms, and the other physical plant and system improvements to maximize our safety.
To my co-workers:
- Thank you for showing up to fight alongside me, despite the personal risks.
What an incredible privilege to live in America at this time! To be in the first 0.01% on the planet to receive this protective vaccine! I cannot express in words how stoked I am.
I know many of you can relate to the anxiety I have felt as I prepared to go into the hospital for each shift for months. Every shift felt like it was my first shift as an attending. I washed my hands 85 times a day like I had OCD. I have been more conscious of what I touch than a third-year medical student on a surgery rotation. Like many of you, I stripped in the garage and dropped my clothes into the washing machine on the way to the shower, where I attempted to burn the virus off my skin and hair with water as hot as I could stand until the hot water heater gave out. While I knew I probably wouldn't have a severe case, I watched my residency-mate, the first doctor on the West Coast to get COVID, barely recover after weeks on ECMO. There are no guarantees. Our physician group refused to meet together in person in order to prevent an outbreak that would shut down the ED. I attempted to work with and communicate with patients through multiple layers of PPE, worrying the whole time it wasn't enough or that I would make a mistake doffing it that would lead to contamination. I held patients' hands and touched them at a time when none of their family or friends wanted to or could, or were even allowed to be in the hospital with them. I worried after encounters with patients I didn't expect to have COVID who later turned out to have it. Did I do everything right? Did I wipe that stethoscope?
I'm not normally a very anxious person, so it was unusual for me to lay awake at night with worry. Yet I did, many times. I thought there was no way I would ever be able to avoid getting COVID before a vaccine was made. I was skeptical that an effective vaccine to a coronavirus could even be made; it's never been done before. But mostly, I was worried I was going to bring it home and give it to family and friends. As the pandemic really hit Utah in the Fall, it all got worse.
In some ways, it was worse because of the guilt. You see, given our financially independent status, I didn't have to work in the emergency department. I could have quit and walked away rather than put my family, friends, and employees at risk. I wrestled with the ethical dilemmas. Did I have a higher duty to protect my family and employees who relied on me for their livelihood? Or did I have a higher duty to my patients as a physician? Was I noble, or just being selfish for continuing to go into the hospital?
Now, in the blink of an eye, I've gone from the most dangerous person in the neighborhood to be around to the safest!
We're not out of the woods yet. In fact, by any metric (case counts, hospitalizations, deaths) things are as bad as they have ever been. This vaccine, although very good, is not perfect. We should double down on our efforts to socially distance, wear masks, wash hands, and optimize medical care of the infected. It is a lot easier to make sacrifices when we know they are only temporary. We certainly need to encourage others to get the vaccine as soon as it is available. (No, I have no significant side effects, not even a strange desire to eat human flesh.) Many people will unfortunately still die before this pandemic ends and nobody wants to be the last person to die in a war. Getting sick and dying after a vaccine becomes available feels like fighting the Battle of New Orleans after the Treaty of Ghent.
However, at this point it is not just that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel; some of us have now passed through the tunnel and have come out the other side. The rest of us will soon follow. Life will gradually return to normal. We will be able to see our family members. We will be able to go to school, church, and live CME conferences without masks and actually be able to shake hands. Businesses will recover. Entire industries that have been smashed will be resurrected.
It is morning in America. Let the light shine throughout the land and across our borders to the rest of the world. Thank you and may we all be grateful this holiday season for our most recent miracle.
What do you think? Have you been vaccinated? What did it mean to you to get it? Comment below!
Via email:
Beautiful post
Via email:
Congratulations on getting the vaccine and thank you for helping so many people when you didn’t have to! Your post this morning summarized everything we’ve felt as my husband and I both get vaccinated this week.
Thank you, thank you – you are truly a special human being! I don’t get anything for brownie points – I just don’t think doctors get thanked enough, so I wanted to tell you!
Via email:
That was incredible!
Thank you for sharing it.
Yesterday day I received my vaccination as well and have felt the same feelings but I could not have expressed it so eloquently.
I teared up reading this.
Via email:
Good essay, although a bit hyperbolic since the recovery rate of Covid is 99.5%-99.9% in ages <70.
My response:
Even if you survive, the rate of complete and total recovery is significantly lower than that. Plus, it doesn't look like a lot of people who get it are having much fun with it.
The 300,000+ dead Americans would likely disagree with that first comment.
Not to mention that the excess death rate is significantly higher and likely represents additional deaths due to COVID.
Plus there are an awful lot of us that are 70+! 17% is over 65.
I coded a man in his 70s last week, withdrawing after all of his children arrived. Their mother died of COVID 2 weeks ago. 0.4% might seem like a small number, but 0.4% * 330 million = 1.2 Million people. By comparison, 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam, 405,000 died in World War II, and 675,000 died in the 1918 flu. Every one of those statistics was a real person with friends and family.
Via email:
beautifully written, doc. too bad it can’t be read by all Americans. thank you
My response:
Why not?
Via email:
I have a side hobby of submitting letters to the editor. You should submit your post today to the SL Trib. I loved it. It brought tears to my eyes in agreement. But you are preaching to the choir–we need our voices to reach outside of our tribe, and I think your piece would be a great op-ed.
Keep up the good work.
Via email:
This is a great post. Thanks for sharing and for what you do
Via email:
Well said and congratulations!
Great post. I can’t wait until I get my vaccination.
I am Tier 2 at one location I work, and Tier 1 at another, so we’ll see which horse comes across the finish line first.
I got tapped to manage the day to day testing and mitigation efforts for the mission critical portion of a local branch of a federal agency. It’s been day after day of putting out one fire after another. Looking forward to being “out of a job”.
Thanks for all you do!
Thank you for your service, guardian!
Thank you for this moving, heartfelt and inspirational post! Thanks for your service and countless hours helping those in need despite your financial independence.
I too felt overjoyed and incredibly grateful to receive this vaccine yesterday. The glimmer of hope has started, and I optimistically pray will spread as infectiously as this deadly disease. Thank you again
I do think this should be read by everyone. I have sent it off to a paper I subscribe to, I hope you hear from them.
Thank you for such a beautiful message and so much difficult important work. The relief of finally getting vaccinated is palpable.
This is the best thing I have read in a very long time. It may be the best thing that has been written in a very long time. Hope and gratitude are more contagious than the virus.
Thank you for your kind words.
I just want to say thank you for writing this post. It’s so relatable. And yes, getting the vaccine is such a bright way to end this year!!!
You’re welcome!
What a great essay. I shared with my non doc friends. It really hits the nail on the head.
So grateful to have received mine already! Some people don’t think of OB as front-line, but who do you think delivers the covid+ labor patients? (Hint: not the ICU docs) During my hospital’s local peak we had close to 10% of all labor patients test positive. Now I’m anxiously awaiting my parents to get their vaccines so they can see their daycare-attending grandkids again!
Via email:
Absolutely beautiful. Hands down the best expression of gratitude, the most real and authentic, I’ve read from anyone anywhere. You reached the finish line when you weren’t sure you would. God bless you. Through your writing, your relief is palpable and the joy in your bursting heart penetrating. Health and happiness to you and your family.
Well said Jim.
Grateful. Both of my parents are in a high-risk group.
Wonderful message!
I would like to add to your list of gratitude the German Government, which largely funded the Pfizer Vaccine you and I both received. Although the US government via Op Warp Speed agreed to purchase effective vaccines, the Trump Administration did not contribute to its development.
German Precision Engineering ftw!
Interesting, I didn’t know that. But reading this article:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-vaccine-s-funding-came-from-berlin-not-washington
It seems a little like semantics. No, the US didn’t front the money, but it did commit to buy the vaccine if it worked! But you’re right, the Germans are the ones who took the gamble. So thank you to them too!
We apparently funded the Moderna vaccine.
long time reader but will be no more and mostly because all the commenters are of the same ilk —
“To Congress and the Trump Administration officials:
Thank you for prioritizing the pursuit of this miracle. I put developing and distributing an effective vaccine to a global pandemic in less than a year on par with sending people to the moon, building twenty B-24 bombers a day, and the Human Genome Project in terms of our greatest government-funded technological accomplishments.”
this is not an olive branch this is misinformation.
You’re welcome back any time.
As noted in the comment above, it is misinformation in that the Germans primarily funded the vaccine. So I’ve corrected it.
That is beautifully worded. However any mea culpas for dismissing this virus earlier in the year? To wit, your Twitter:
“Most years flu kills 12,000 to 61,000. In 1918 it killed 50 million. I guess I’ll start worrying about coronavirus when the death toll catches up to flu in my patient population. Funny how “new” is scarier than “deadly.” #peoplepanic”
“So far this season 71 people have died of coronavirus and 8200 have died of influenza. #perspective”
There was one comment how the news media was blowing coronavirus all out of proportion (written in early Feb) as well but I can’t find it. I’m disturbed and disappointed by your initial attitude, by a doctor no less. I’ve had close friends whose parents have died. It still sticks in my craw how so many thought it was overblown hype, of which you were one.
That Tweet didn’t age well did it? But I still agree with its main point that perspective is key and certainly there were many things that were overblown and maybe still are in some places. However, the numbers changed (1.6 Million dead of COVID so far) and so of course my opinion changed. In the words of Samuelson (and maybe Keynes):
Some examples of things that were overblown:
1. The need for mass numbers of ventilators- (Can anyone name a single person who died in the US from lack of a ventilator? I don’t know of one. )
2. The need to shut down every business in Utah for 6 weeks when there were 10-15 cases in the state and none in most of its counties (but then it somehow became fine to open them all back up when the cases went up 10X that and leave them open when cases went up to 200X that)
3. The idea that school and business closures worked better to prevent spread than simple masking and distancing protocols (that one was expensive)
4. The lack of toilet paper, bottled water, generators etc in stores for weeks. (This was particularly ridiculous and caused by pure panic).
Believing that some initial responses and particularly the news media coverage of them were overblown is not incompatible with also taking a reasonable amount of caution and having a reasonable fear of acquiring and spreading the virus especially once it is present in your local area. Both can be true at the same time.
Admire that you can admit your opinion changed. However, as a lawyer, may I point out that the evidence you summoned in your defense of your scoffing initial attitude (your Points 1-4) is not really relevant (legal term: inapposite) to my point. Sure people panicked and overbought toilet paper but that was not what you were saying–you were saying that the fears of the VIRUS were overblown and you were not worried about Covid. Flu was more of a risk, you said.
I’m hoping there’s a lesson-learned about scoffing at reports that specialists were pointing out the potential for a worldwide, devastating pandemic based on the best evidence at hand. Yes it was being reported in the popular press rather feverishly, but that was based on the utmost urgency that people who were in the know were reacting to this threat. I think Scott Atlas might be a cautionary figure here. I doubt that you want to be that type of doctor.
Take care. I just heard today that our cardiologist friend, who lives in Arizona and was vaccinated first dose 2 weeks ago, was diagnosed positive with Covid today. An initial vaccination is certainly not a complete preventative.
Imagine what it is like to live your life online where there is a written record of everything you ever said or did. And then imagine that several hundred thousand people read along. And then imagine that a few of them, while remaining completely anonymous, like to go back and pull out something you wrote months ago and use it to somehow make you feel bad and insult you. How would you feel about that? Was the goal of your comments to make me feel that way, or what was really your goal?
At any rate, thanks for reading along, but the pointless criticism gets old sometimes. I”m a real person trying to make my way through the world just like you, except I’m not anonymous in this conversation.
Hear, hear!
Take THAT, COVID-deniers on Forum and Facebook Group!
Nice post. Are you saying Trump is immune now since he has had it? I’ve read reports that some folks have gotten it again months after their first bout. I’m not a healthcare professional nor do I personally know anyone that has been sick twice with Covid-19.
I’m glad that you have corrected the fact that Germany funded the development of the vaccine that you received.
Even the vaccine doesn’t provide perfect immunity, but you’re FAR more likely to be immune after having it or having had the vaccine than you were before.
If, and I know it’s a big if, there was a choice between vaccines later on, for those not so high up the priority list to be receiving a vaccination now, would you prefer the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine and why? Thanks.
I’d take the first one I was offered. I believe they’re fairly similar in mechanism, safety, and effectiveness.
What is the general consensus of everyone who has already had a positive Covid 19 infection. Still get the vaccine?
I thought I saw a recommendation to wait 90 days somewhere. I think that’s what my hospital is following.