Sandra Lindsay, an intensive care nurse at a Queens borough hospital, was the first New Yorker inoculated with the Covid-19 vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA, en English) from the United States, last Friday.
In a live connection through video, in which the governor of the state, Andrew Cuomo, Lindsay, who works at the Jewish Medical Center hospital in Queens, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic in the country, received the vaccine.
“I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history,” said this African American nurse after receiving the dose of the vaccine. “We are in a pandemic, so we all have to do our part,”
added.
The administration of the vaccine comes at a time when cases are rising in the United States, when the country has already accumulated 299,000 deaths.
As she told Lindsay that she hoped the vaccine would give her and other workers a sense of greater “security.”
“The process for the vaccine to reach a critical mass will take months. So, this is the light at the end of the tunnel, but it is a long tunnel,” said the governor, who reiterated the message that the population should continue to respect social distancing measures.
Batches of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine left the company’s Michigan plant Sunday. The doses were sent in boxes with dry ice (dry ice), which will keep them at -70 ºC, the temperature necessary to preserve the compound.
For his part, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, announced on Monday that the first vaccines against covid-19, manufactured by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, have already begun to be administered.
“The first vaccines have been administered. Congratulations to the United States! Congratulations to the world!” The president said on Twitter.
The start of the vaccination campaign serves to open a new chapter in the battle against the coronavirus in the United States, where almost 300,000 people have lost their lives and more than 16 million have been infected with the virus, more than any other country in the United States. world in absolute terms.
The vaccination began after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the body that regulates the marketing of drugs in the United States, approved the vaccine on Friday night after a rigorous examination to assess its risks. and benefits.
On Sunday, airplanes and refrigerated trucks began distributing the vaccines to hundreds of vaccination points established across the country as part of Operation Warp Speed, launched by the White House with the help of the Pentagon to facilitate a distribution. as quickly as possible.
According to General Gustave Perna, in charge of the logistics operation for the distribution of the vaccine, 145 points in the country (many of them hospitals) will receive the vaccine this Monday, while 425 will do so on Tuesday and 66 on Wednesday. In total, during this week, the Government will send 2.9 million doses to the 50 US states and their territories.
EFE
