Hope and relief after 1st COVID-19 vaccines in the US | U.S

Health workers across the United States received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine on Monday, while the hope that a vaccination campaign could defeat COVID-19 was faced with the dire reality that 300,000 people have died from the disease in the nation.

I feel “relieved,” said intensive care nurse Sandra Lindsay after becoming the first person to be vaccinated in the nation at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York. “I feel the cure is coming.”

With a countdown, workers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center began vaccinating staff to applause.

And in Colorado, Governor Jared Polis opened the door to the FedEx driver and signed off on a package containing 975 frozen doses of the vaccine developed by pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.

The injections kicked off what will be the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history, one that could finally bring the outbreak under control.

Dr. Valeria Briones-Pryor, who has worked in the COVID-19 unit at the University of Louisville Hospital since March and recently lost her 27th patient to the virus, was among the first to be vaccinated.

“I want to see my family again,” he said. “I want families to be able to see their loved ones again.”

Some 145 sites across the country, from Rhode Island to Alaska, received shipments of the vaccines and more deliveries are planned in the coming days. High-risk health workers were first in line.

“These are 20,000 doses of hope,” said John Couris, president and CEO of Tampa General Hospital.

Nursing home residents also take priority, and a Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Massachusetts, announced on Twitter that its first dose was for World War II veteran Margaret Klessens, 96. Other homes for the elderly in the country hope to start vaccinating in the coming days.

The vaccination campaign began on the same day that the death toll from coronavirus in the United States surpassed the 300,000 mark, according to the Johns Hopkins University count. The number of deaths is equivalent to the population of cities like St. Louis or Pittsburgh. It is more than five times the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. It is the same as an attack like the one on September 11, 2001, occurring every day for more than 100 days.

“To think that we can now treat 3,000 deaths a day in our nation as normal is just a moral flaw,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins.

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Associated Press journalists Marion Renault, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Rebecca Santana, Dylan Lovan, Tamara Lush and Kathy Young contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.