A historic vaccine that’s just one part of the picture

When the moment finally arrived, at 10:47 a.m. Monday under a makeshift tent that blocked the chilly mist, it fell to Dr. Ajay Kumar to roll up his left shirt sleeve and to Marylou Oshana for the act itself. The rest of us watched history.

Some 1,960 deep-frozen COVID-19 vaccines arrived at Hartford Hospital amid fanfare and security a couple of hours earlier. The governor, the Hartford HealthCare CEO and key medical folks gave speeches about the

If the vaccine works as promised, safely and with 95 percent effectiveness — according to clinical trials that might be considered preliminary at any other time — will its rollout happen smoothly?

10-month miracle from Pfizer.

They offered emotional calls to make this the D-Day turnaround that will beat back a pandemic that killed its 300,000th American on the same day.

Then came the shot — just like ten thousand others Oshana has given for the flu and other threats.

Her hands were cold, she later said, but rock steady. That much I could tell from my vantage point less than four feet away.

“When people were talking, that’s when I was more nervous,” said Oshana, a nurse who’s clinical supervisor of colleague health at Hartford Hospital. “Then when we had to start just doing it, it was Ajay, myself and the rest of the world wasn’t there.”

If this is to be the great momentum-changer the state and the nation hopes to see, billions of these vaccines will need to work in a mundane way around the world, along with lots of other social and medical measures. It’s not a cure-all, it’s part of the big response — which includes, or should include, more people paying more attention to their own powers to ward off illness.

Even without the vaccine from Pfizer, and the ones to follow, starting with Moderna’s version,

we’re seeing signs that COVID-19 has reached a plateau. Transmission rates are not rising. The number of people in hospitals with coronavirus is flattening, slightly. Death rates are down.

“Right now it’s plateauing at a high peak,” said Kumar, who’s executive vice president and chief clinical officer at Hartford HealthCare, after he sat for that first vaccine injection. “So I’m confident that as we manage the pandemic, as we manage our patients at this time, and if we continue to have discipline across Connecticut, and make sure the folks continue to have social distancing and all that, we will be able to manage the winter well.”

Predictions of a peak and decline have been, as Kumar put it, “somewhat all over the place.” The threat remains dire.

“We are bursting at the seams. ... We have more patients than beds,” said Dr. Michelle McDade, associate chief of the emergency department at the Hospital of Central Connecticut in New Britain, which, like Hartford Hospital, is part of Hartford HealthCare.

“The busy, COVID-heavy hospitals are definitely not flattening out yet,” McDade said. She was at the scene to see her wife, Ewelina McDade, a regional nursing education manager, become one of the first to receive the vaccine.

That huge question, with new data from the weekend, hovered with the mist on the same day when Connecticut’s seven delegates to the Electoral College met a mile away at the state Capitol, and in all 50 states — to anoint President-elect Joe Biden even as the current White House occupant refuses to concede.

The question of COVID’s grip hovered on the same day when Connecticut, and the rest of the world, sadly recalled the Sandy Hook massacre eight years before. And it happened on the same day when restaurant owners rallied at the Capitol, and at the governor’s residence across Hartford, demanding financial help.

And so the COVID-19 vaccine heralds a momentous end to a momentous year, 12 months after an unknown virus in Wuhan, China, launched a crisis that changed human culture forever. If the vaccine works as promised, safely and with 95 percent effectiveness — according to clinical trials that might be considered preliminary at any other time — will its rollout happen smoothly?

Gov. Ned Lamont and Jeffrey Flaks, the Hartford HealthCare CEO, both talked Monday about a dilemma they faced. Should they take the vaccine first, leading the way for thousands of their employees and a public looking for examples? Or, should they wait a few weeks until their turns come up based on their ages and jobs?

“It’s a close call,” said Lamont, 66, who, in the end, opted to let federal health officials and his own public health commissioner decide what he should do. He asked me what I’d do and I said I’d wait my turn if I were him.

“I was really conflicted,” said Flaks, who turned 50 a couple of weeks ago, “but ultimately I felt the more correct thing to do is to wait.”

These questions seemed to converge at the point of the needles painlessly piercing the bare arms of Kumar, and a minute later across the same table, of Keith Grant, an advanced-practice registered nurse who heads infections disease prevention at Hartford HealthCare. That the honor found two immigrants of color who have excelled by any standards made the day all the more pointed.

“We are now in a place where we can say this is a day of hope, this is a day of change. Not just for Hartford HealthCare, not just for our state but for our nation,” said Dr. Melisha Cumberland, medical director at Hartford HealthCare’s Windham Hospital.

“I’m a football fan and I think I can see the end zone,” Lamont said Monday after attending all of it — the vaccinations, the Sandy Hook commemorations, the Electoral College, the restaurant rally. “But I also know that there’s an awful lot of blocking and tackling we need to do.”

That shot Oshana delivered into Kumar’s deltoid muscle, making Connecticut history, was also just a tiny piece of teamwork. A Plainville resident, she played shortstop for the softball team at St. Paul’s in Bristol. The ball comes your way, you focus, make a clean toss and you’re part of something bigger. “I used to be able to throw to home,” she said.

So she had a good arm. And so did Kumar, who said he didn’t even notice the vaccine injection. “I thought my colleague Marylou did a great job.”