Volunteers are key at vaccine sites. It pays off with a shot
When Seattle’s largest health care system got a mandate from Washington state to start a mass COVID-19 vaccination site, organizers knew that gathering enough volunteers would be almost as crucial as the vaccine itself.
“We could not do this without volunteers,” said Renee Rassilyer-Bomers, chief quality officer for Swedish Health Services and head of its vaccination site at Seattle University. “The sheer volume and number of folks that we wanted to be able to serve and bring in requires … 320 individuals each day.”
As states ramp up vaccination distribution in the fight against the coronavirus, volunteers are needed to do everything from direct traffic to check people in, so vaccination sites run smoothly. In return for their work, they are often given a shot. Many people who don’t yet qualify for a vaccine, including those who are young and healthy, have been volunteering in hopes of getting a dose they otherwise may not receive for months. Large vaccination clinics across the country have seen thousands trying to nab limited numbers of volunteer shifts.
It has raised questions at this time when supplies are limited and some Americans have struggled to get vaccinated even if they are eligible. But medical ethicists say volunteers are key to the public health effort and there is nothing wrong with them wanting protection from the virus.
Scores a shot
Ben Dudden, 35, of Roanoke, Va., volunteered at a mass-vaccination clinic in the nearby city of Salem on
a day off from his part-time job at the Roanoke Pinball Museum. His wife, a nurse practitioner who was administering doses, encouraged him to volunteer, in case he could get vaccinated.
He spent that January day helping people fill out questionnaires, not knowing if he might get the coveted dose.
“It wasn’t an official thing like, ‘Everybody who needs a vaccine come this way.’ I kind of had to ask,” Dudden said. “At end of day, I found whoever was in charge of that.”
He got what he was hoping for and still wants to volunteer again.
“It was a little bit of a selfish thing — ‘I’m going to get the vaccine if I do this’ — but for me, it wasn’t the only factor,”
Dudden said.
At the Seattle vaccination clinic, Swedish Health Services considers volunteers part of the state’s Phase 1 vaccination group. About 5,000 have been inoculated, and about 1,000 of them have come back to work again, Rassilyer-Bomer said.
During their shifts, volunteers are handed colored vests matched to their skill level and experience. The majority wear orange for general tasks, which includes sanitizing clipboards, asking people to fill out forms, taking temperatures and monitoring the newly vaccinated to ensure no dangerous side effects.
Some may question whether it is fair for volunteers to get to the front of the
line for what is often clerical work.
Nancy Berlinger, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center, a research institute in Garrison, N.Y., said the bottom line is that volunteers are interacting with the public and there is nothing wrong with them wanting protection.
They also go through training and other obligations.
“There would be easier ways to game the system,” Berlinger said. “If that was really your goal, this could take more work I think than some other routes I can think of.”
While many volunteer shifts are several hours on weekdays, Berlinger said that doesn’t necessarily
mean only people of a certain class or demographic can sacrifice that much time.
“That could apply to students, it could apply to people who are unemployed, people who are retired. It could be people who are family caregivers,” Berlinger said.
‘Important and big’
On a chilly January night in suburban Phoenix, Lou Ann Lovell, a 67-year-old retiree, got the Pfizer vaccine after volunteering from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. at a state-run site at State Farm Stadium, where the Arizona Cardinals play. Her daughter persuaded her and other relatives to volunteer.
Lovell committed before realizing those 65 and older would be eligible for vaccines days later. Still, she is glad she did.
“For the first time, I felt I was part of something that was really important and big,” said Lovell, who would like to volunteer again. “You stand there and see all these headlights and people are just continually pouring in there.”
The stadium and another state-run site in metro Phoenix require a combined 3,900 volunteers a week. HandsOn Greater Phoenix, a nonprofit handling online volunteer recruitment, opens 1,400 to 2,000 spots a few times a week, and interest hasn’t waned, CEO Rhonda Oliver said. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people try to sign up every time new spots open, she said.
Volunteers who have nabbed shifts say they shouldn’t be lumped in with those who believe they are entitled to a vaccine.
In the Seattle area, three King County hospitals came under fire last month after revelations that donors, board members and some hospital volunteers used their connections to get shots. The King County Council approved a measure calling on state lawmakers and Gov. Jay Inslee to make it illegal to grant special access to the vaccine.
Berlinger said there is a clear delineation between a connected official and a volunteer at a vaccine clinic getting a shot.
“The volunteers we’re talking about at registration centers are people who are part of the public-health effort. They are performing a crucial role,” Berlinger said. “It’s easier to help people who already have privilege. The thing about COVID is we have to push away from that and we have to say, ‘No, we must allocate vaccine and vaccination.’”
Because the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer charged in George Floyd’s death is being held during the coronavirus pandemic, the courtroom has been overhauled for safety.
Gone are the traditional jury box and gallery, replaced with widely spaced seats and desks for a limited contingent of attorneys, jurors and media. Plexiglas barriers and hand sanitizer are everywhere, and the participants, even the judge, wear masks.
The pandemic has upended court systems across the country, delaying jury trials and causing huge backlogs of cases. Video and teleconference hearings have allowed judges to keep the wheels of justice grinding, albeit slowly. Many courts have installed barriers or moved jury orientation and even trials to bigger spaces, such as convention centers to get at least some jury trials going again.
In Minnesota, in-person criminal jury trials have been mostly on hold since November. Chief Justice Lorie Gildea last month allowed them to resume effective March 15, with proper safety protocols consistent with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Minnesota Department of Health. Most other proceedings will continue to be held remotely through April 30.
A handful of exceptions have been allowed, including for the trial of Derek Chauvin’s trial, the former Minneapolis officer charged in Floyd’s death.
“We are gradually increasing in-person activities
in court facilities in a safe and responsible manner that will allow the courts to fulfill our constitutional obligation, while we continue to do all that we can to protect public health and safety,” Gildea said in a statement.
Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter.
Cases separated
Citing the need to comply with social distancing and other safety rules, Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill separated Chauvin’s case from that of the three other exofficers charged in Floyd’s death, who are set for trial in August. Among other things, Cahill concluded
in January, no courtroom in the building was big enough to safely accommodate four defense teams and the prosecution team all at once.
Prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to persuade Cahill to reconsider his decision to hold two trials. They argued instead for holding a single joint trial sometime this summer, when they hoped enough Minnesotans would have been vaccinated to reduce the risk of any participants getting COVID-19.
They submitted an affidavit from prominent University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who warned that it could be “extremely dangerous” to try Chauvin
this month, with “potentially catastrophic consequences for public heath.” He expressed fear that it could become a “superspreader event,” given the large number of protesters and out-of-town journalists it was likely to draw, especially if more-contagious coronavirus variants cause a spike in cases.
But Cahill provided little explanation for rejecting those arguments, having already ruled that the proceedings would comply with court safety rules, and he kept the case on course for the trial’s opening on Monday.
The 18th-floor courtroom Cahill borrowed is the largest in the Hennepin County Government
Center, and it has been overhauled for the purposes of Chauvin’s trial:
• The seating capacity was sharply reduced in the remodeling.
• The theater-style seating in what was the gallery was removed to create space.
• Tall plexiglass dividers separate the judge and court staffers from the limited number of other people in the courtroom.
• Clear plastic sheets also run down the middle of the defense and prosecution tables. When Chauvin and defense attorney Eric Nelson want to confer, they need to lean back a bit.
• The normal jury box has been replaced with two rows of office chairs, spaced out, with small desks.
• There is no space for the general public. Seats are reserved in the back for just one Floyd family member and just one Chauvin family member.
• Only two pool reporters are allowed in at a time, plus a member of the Court TV team that is providing the feed.
Requirement met
The constitutional requirement for a public trial is being satisfied by allowing gavel-to-gavel TV coverage, which is rare in Minnesota courts. Cahill has taken pains to keep the identities of the potential jurors secret, prohibiting them from being shown on camera. But he got a surprise Tuesday when a retired judge watching from home texted him to let him know that he could see a reflection of Juror No. 1 in one of the plexiglass panels. The problem was quickly fixed.
Everyone in the courtroom is required to wear a face mask. The main exceptions are when attorneys speak at the podium, which has plastic panes on three sides, and when potential jurors respond to questions.
When the judge and the attorneys need to conduct a sidebar discussion, they don’t huddle around the judge’s bench as they normally would. Instead, they put on headsets so they can hash out legal or procedural issues out of earshot of jurors.
Only four prosecutors and two defense attorneys are in court at any given time; the rest of their teams must participate remotely. So must the defense teams for the three other ex-officers facing trial this summer.
IOWA CITY, IOWA >> An Iowa journalist covering a protest for racial justice was temporarily blinded after a police officer shot pepper spray at her and then jailed despite telling him repeatedly that she was just doing her job, according to video played Tuesday at the reporter’s trial.
Body camera video captured by Des Moines Police Sgt. Natale Chiodo showed Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri in custody on May 31, 2020, her eyes burning from pepper spray. She said she was with the newspaper and asked Officer Luke Wilson why he was arresting her, adding that she was in pain and couldn’t see.
“This is my job,” Sahouri says on the video. “I’m just doing my job. I’m a journalist.”
Sahouri’s defense played the video for jurors on the second day of the trial in which Sahouri and her former boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, are charged with failure to disperse and interference with official acts. The prosecution has drawn widespread criticism from media and human-rights advocates, who say that the charges are an attack on press freedom. The pair face fines and potentially even jail time if convicted.
Wilson testified that he failed to record the arrest on his body camera and did not notify a supervisor as required by department policy. But Chiodo’s body camera captured the scene shortly after Wilson detained Sahouri.
Chiodo said he did not arrest a second Register reporter with Sahouri, Katie Akin, because she wasn’t disobeying orders and
“seemed very scared,” telling her to leave instead.
Akin testified that she was surprised to see an officer pepper spray and arrest Sahouri because “I didn’t understand us to be breaking any laws or doing anything wrong.” Akin said she began yelling to police that they were journalists and showing a press badge.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation called the video powerful evidence that Sahouri “was arrested while doing her job reporting on historic protests.”
“This arrest should never have been made and the prosecutor should never have brought these charges,” the group said in a tweet.
Des Moines Register executive editor Carol Hunter testified that the newspaper
assigned Sahouri to cover the protest at Merle Hay mall days after the death of George Floyd, the Black Minneapolis man who was declared dead after a white officer put his knee on his neck for about nine minutes. Hunter said Sahouri did her job “very well” that night, reporting observations and images of the event live on Twitter.
Hunter said Sahouri did not violate newspaper policy by allowing her boyfriend to join her at the event, which she said made sense, given that it was a dangerous situation.
No formal credentials
She said the paper had not issued any formal credentials to Sahouri and that employees only had security badges at that time, which were optional to carry. Authorities have
said Sahouri wasn’t wearing press credentials.
Wilson, an 18-year veteran of the Des Moines Police Department, said he responded to the protest and found a “riotous mob” that was breaking store windows, throwing rocks and water bottles at officers, and running in different directions. He said his unit was told to clear a parking lot, and he used a device known as a fogger to blanket the area with clouds of pepper spray.
He said the chemical irritants worked in forcing most of the crowd to scatter, including Robnett, but that he decided Sahouri needed to be arrested when she did not leave. Wilson said he was unaware that Sahouri was a journalist.
Wilson said that he grabbed her with his left hand while his fogger was in his right hand. Wilson said that Robnett returned and tried to pull Sahouri out of his grasp, and Wilson said deployed more pepper spray that “incapacitated” Robnett.
Sahouri was taken to jail in a police van and released hours later.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Nicholas Klinefeldt, Wilson said that he charged Sahouri with interference because she briefly pulled her left arm away while he was arresting her. He acknowledged that he didn’t mention that claim in his police report on the arrest.
The body camera
Wilson said that he only rarely used his body camera during his normal job at the city airport, wrongly believed it had recorded Sahouri’s arrest and was unfamiliar with the details of the department’s bodycamera policy.
The cameras are always capturing video when on, and can retrieve video of incidents that were not recorded afterward if they have not yet been erased. Officers who fail to record incidents they should have are required to notify supervisors, who can then try to recover video that does not have audio.
Prosecutors say Sahouri and Robnett ignored a police order to leave the area that was broadcast over a public-address system about 90 minutes before their arrests.
The defense argues that order was intended only to clear an intersection where protesters were blocking a squad car. Akin, the Register reporter who wasn’t arrested, testified that she didn’t have the impression that she was supposed to leave, and continued her reporting.
Body-camera video played in court showed officers yelling at protesters to get out of the intersection and instructing them to be peaceful. Robnett and Sahouri complied.
A separate order to disperse could be heard faintly on the video in the background, so quiet that even an officer testifying for the prosecution seemed to struggle to make it out. But prosecutors argued the message was louder at the scene.