Older residents lead way on vaccination

We’ve heard from more than a few people who are apprehensive about getting a covid-19 vaccine, saying they just aren’t sure about it. One can fill in the blanks here because there are quite a few reasons given.

The two vaccines that are out right now are highly effective at keeping a person from getting sick and dying from the coronavirus, but researchers are still studying how effective the vaccines are at protecting someone from actually getting the virus. Just Friday, the news came out that a representative from Massachusetts had gotten both shots of one vaccine, and more than a week after getting the second shot, he tested positive for covid-19.

So there’s still much that we don’t know. But what we do know from the vaccine tests is that they save lives, and we’ve lost so many people to this — close to 440,000 at last count in the United States alone.

And we must say, Pine Bluff has been cranking on getting these shots out to the public. Kudos to Lelan Stice with Doctor’s Orders Pharmacy and to Jefferson Regional hospital. They are both taking names and processing people as fast as they can get the vaccines.

Friday was a good example. Close to 1,000 senior citizens came through the Pine Bluff Convention Center, in orderly fashion, and got their shots. We hear there was toe-tapping as oldies were piped through the sound system.

One woman was 102, and another was just a few weeks shy of 100. Ora Hawkins, the 102-year-old, told her daughter that she wanted to get the shots, and her daughter said absolutely, mom, we will go. Hawkins pointed out that she’d been through a lot in her long life. One was that she survived the Spanish flu of 1918, which lasted two years and killed 50 million people across the planet. She said also that she had buried six children and was a widow.

“I’m used to doing this all the time,” she said. “I’ve lived through more than this.”

Spoken like a true survivor.

Mildred Pierce, who will turn 100 in a month, said she, too, had been roughed up in life and that taking the shot was something she wanted to do.

“I don’t like shots, but this shot is important,” she said. “I’ve had two major surgeries with cancer on my face, and the Lord has been right with me.”

The goal at the convention center was 1,000 senior citizens, a group that is now in the first part of the Phase 1-B classification and eligible to get the shots since Jan. 18. The effort, aided by many different groups that volunteered their time and talents, got to around 850. But as Stice said, counting the people getting their shots at his pharmacy and the people the hospital was serving at sites around town, some 2,000 people got vaccinated that day. That’s 2,000 people who are well on their way to not being a sad statistic.

Thank you, centenarians and all senior citizens for showing the rest of us what the face of courage looks like. They know what we all need to acknowledge, that the vaccine is the way we are going to beat this thing. If they have the wherewithal to get the shot, then surely the rest of us do.