Dr. Jack Reed has worked for Baptist Memorial Hospital for 45 years, and on Wednesday, he was the first employee there to receive a COVID-19 vaccination.
Reed, Baptist’s first chief medical officer and currently on the faculty for the hospital’s residency program, is one of the oldest employees at the hospital at 73, so administrators strongly urged him to be vaccinated.
“It was my pleasure,” he told media members at the hospital as Registered Nurse Shelly Kidder cleaned and put a Band-Aid over the spot on his arm where she’d inserted the needle a few moments before. “I think it’s the right thing for me to do, and I think it’s the right thing for our country.”
Reed was one of about 60 employees who took their first round of the Moderna vaccine after Baptist received a shipment of 500 doses Wednesday. More staff will receive the vaccine next week after Christmas holidays.
Staff at OCH Regional Medical Center in Starkville also received 100 doses of the Moderna vaccine and began vaccinating their front-line staff on Monday.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine for emergency use last week, allowing hospitals and long-term care facilities all over the country to begin vaccinating staff that work most closely with COVID-19 patients and are at highest risk of contracting the virus.
At Baptist, administrators set up tables where nurses would give the vaccine to staff members with the highest risk of coming into contact with COVID-19. After the staff members received their shot, they moved to a waiting area in the room to schedule a follow-up appointment for about 28 days later to receive a second dose of the vaccine.
That included Dr. Gaurav Dutta, who received the first dose of the vaccine. He said he barely felt the shot at all.
He is much more concerned about the virus’ effect at the hospital, where, as a pulmonologist and critical care doctor, he works directly with COVID-19 patients.
“At this point, I think we are in the thickest of it,” he said. “I don’t think it’s been this bad all year long, and we are actively being bombarded with people who are really, really sick. We probably are experiencing the worst of COVID right now.”
Mississippi State Department of Health reported 2,634 new cases of the virus around the state on Tuesday alone, and Lowndes County has seen 3,913 cases since the pandemic began in March.
Doctors at Baptist said those numbers are why it is so critical for people to take the vaccine as it becomes available.
“We want everyone to develop immunity,” Baptist Director of Pharmacy Eli Hilton said. “If not, you’re going to be at risk for infection, not only for yourself but to infect other people when you get it. It’s going to take a long time to develop herd immunity if we just wait for everyone to get it. But if enough people get this vaccine, that’ll mean we can go back to living like normal sooner.”
Reed said there are two factors that will make that happen: the availability of the vaccine — Hilton said he hopes the vaccine will become available for the general public in the Golden Triangle in the spring — and compliance. In other words, people have to be willing to be vaccinated.
“If we don’t vaccinate a significant number of people, we won’t make a difference,” Reed said. “We won’t be able to win the battle.”
Though the vaccine was passed under emergency use rather than going through the usual FDA approval process, Reed said, more than 100,000 people participated in clinical trials for the five or six companies that are working on a vaccine, including Moderna and Pfizer, the other COVID-19 vaccine the FDA has given emergency use clearance. In those trials, the vaccines were shown to be 90 percent effective against the virus, which is better than the annual flu shot, he said.
Still he worries there is a lot of distrust among the COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general due to a lack of information.
That’s one of the reasons he got vaccinated. After being a doctor in the community for 45 years, he feels people will be reassured if they know he’s taken it.
“I know a lot of people in this community who respect my opinion because it’s based on science,” he said. “It’s not based on politics. It’s not based on anything but facts.”
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