An endless stream of rain-drenched New Yorkers enter the Javits Center, the sprawling conference center in western Manhattan. This is where New York Governor Andrew Cuomo held most of his press conferences at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was there, too, that a gigantic field hospital had been installed to relieve saturated care structures, when New York was the epicenter of the epidemic, in the spring of 2020. One year and almost 32,000 deaths later In the first American city, under the tall glass roofs and steel beams of the building designed by architects James Ingo Freed and Ieoh Ming Pei in the 1980s, people rush seven days a week to get vaccinated. Nicknamed JAVax, it is one of those mega-sites for vaccination, everywhere free, which have opened in recent months in the United States. This Monday alone, 11,157 New Yorkers received a precious dose there, Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson.
“Usually, I’m not that excited”
I am one of them. Irrepressible smile under a surgical mask, I followed the mazes delimited by ropes in part of the 170,000 m2 of the building. The organization is disciplined, precise. Even military: it is the soldiers of the National Guard, in fatigues, who welcome and guide the future vaccinated. A woman’s voice, broadcast over loudspeakers, recalls social distancing measures, and concludes with a vibrant «We’re all in this together». I have the impression of having landed in a blockbuster, at the time of the eternal discourse of patriotic unity. That moment when, after long suffering, we understand that America is going to save us, or save itself. The country vaccinates with a cruising rate of 3.1 million doses each day.
There is a bit of resourcefulness too. At the Javits Center, patient registration officers are seated behind four lines of desks, more than a hundred in all. To communicate with the soldiers, sometimes at the other end of the immense hall, they each have a large first price type lamp at Ikea, on which is taped a number, and whose bulb they flash when they are available to the patient. following. Contrasting with the steep ones «Sir» or “Ma’am” soldiers, these employees call you by your first name, have a questionnaire filled out and give a leaflet that lists the potential side effects (“chills”, “muscle pain”, “nausea”) and the ingredients of Pfizer, the one that will be administered to me, in case of allergies (be aware that there are, among others, mRNA, lipids, potassium chloride and sucrose, but do not try not to do it again at home).
Then comes the last straight line. A somewhat intense soldier indicates with his finger which line to get into, declaiming: «One! This is your happy place. Two! This is your happy place. Three!» And so on. Vaccination is done in the assembly line. The nurse asks me if I usually fall for it after bites. «Non», but at the same time, “Usually I’m not so excited to be vaccinated”. Time to say that, and I didn’t even feel the needle. I am given a bottle of water, a small box with the appointment for the second dose, and a sticker «I got my vaccination at the Javits Center», showing an arm that binds the muscle with a bandage, which I cherish as a good point in CE1. All that remains is to wait a quarter of an hour to monitor the reaction to the product. The wait is done in music: a piano has been set up to entertain the neo-vaccinated, and a guy is playing a kind of happy ragtime. There’s even a station for taking selfies, and «thank you notes» for teams, to be completed and pinned on large cork boards. In less than forty minutes all inclusive, it is folded.
Compulsively refresh pages
On the other hand, making an appointment online, it was Hunger Games. Every morning, open ten tabs in parallel, on the sites of the city, the State, pharmacies or unofficial aggregators created by skilled Internet users. Compulsively refresh the pages, in an attempt to grab a niche. Then the grail, after several fruitless days and frustration in front of the selfies of vaccinated friends. A shame, when it came close to being vaccinated before my parents in France… At the end of March, Governor Andrew Cuomo had announced that all over 30s, without any criteria of profession or co-morbidities, were eligible for vaccination. Then, from April 6, all over 16 years old. Leaving aside category “1c”, a group of essential workers – employees of transport, logistics, food, and communication (thus, journalists). This group, supposed to be a priority, must now play elbows with the entire city.
The governor of New York, first praised for his management of the pandemic, is today accused of sexual harassment and of having downgraded the numbers of deaths linked to Covid in retirement homes. Bad tongues were quick to attribute this vaccine open-bar, like its flash signature to a law legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, to a desire to create a diversion. At the same time, more than 40% of adult New Yorkers have received at least one dose to date. We’re not going to quibble.
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