History made
Senior living community worker gets first dose of COVID-19 vaccine
Alicensed vocational nurse who is the senior director of health and wellness at Skyline Place, a Sonora senior living community for scores of elderly residents, became the first person in Tuolumne County to receive a COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday.
Debbie Squadrito, 58, got the very first of 780 initial doses of the vaccine designated for the county. She said she went to the Tuolumne County Health Department building off Cedar Road near Cabezut Road in Sonora about 1:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, and the whole process took about 10 minutes.
“I was given a card with the date to return for my second dose of vaccine,” Squadrito said. Asked if she’d felt any after effects from her first dose of coronavirus vaccine, she said, “No nothing yet. Not even a sore arm. The nurse that gave it to me, she was a pro.”
Squadrito said she works with more than 90 residents in the Skyline Place senior living community. The people she helps care for range in age from their 70s to their 90s, with a few residents close to 100 years old.
“I do work with the senior community and I don’t want to be responsible for bringing any of that virus into the building with my residents,” she said. “They are the most vulnerable to the virus.”
Given ongoing controversy, denial and division in communities across the United States, over whether the pandemic itself is real and whether a vaccine will be safe and effective, Squadrito said, “I would urge everyone to get the vaccine so we can stop the spread of COVID, and our nation can go back to being normal, maybe.”
For vaccine skeptics and doubters, Squadrito said, “Don’t believe anything you read on the internet about the COVID vaccine. Call your county health department and ask questions. I would not believe anything on the internet. Anything on the internet, at the very least, I would take it with a grain of salt. Any questions, I would definitely ask my M.D. or the county health department. I would not believe anything on the internet.”
Squadrito added, “I would like to thank my president,
President Trump, for pushing this effort to get the vaccine available at warp speed, and bring this to the public as quickly as possible. If I could thank him directly, I would.”
The county received 975 doses of the coronavirus vaccine Wednesday, though 195 will be sent to Mariposa County as its allocation, Dr. Eric Sergienko, the interim health officer for Tuolumne County and full-time health officer for Mariposa County, said Wednesday.
“Only the first shots were sent,” he said. “We will get the second round in three weeks.”
Asked about the safety, viability, and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine, Sergienko said Wednesday afternoon he had just listened to medical scientists with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval committee discussing the vaccine rollout underway this week across the nation.
“There were no shortcuts in the approval process,” he said. “They went through all the steps to ensure the vaccine is a safe product. There were concerns expressed about the shortness of the clinical trials. But the time frame was so short because they recruited tens of thousands of people to put through the trial, and that large sample showed it’s safe and effective.”
Everyone who gets the coronavirus vaccine will get one shot first and a second shot in 21 days, Sergienko said.
Asked what people can expect when they agree to take the vaccine themselves, Sergienko said, “We know the first shot is tolerated reasonably well. The second shot some people will get aches and pains, muscle aches and perhaps headaches, similar to a flu shot. It’s significant enough that about one-third of people who get that second shot may want to take a day off from work. Those people will bounce back from it and return to work in 12 to 72 hours.”
Sergienko said that a trial study of the vaccine showed it is effective in preventing individuals from getting COVID-19, and if an individual does get the virus, the vaccine will reduce its severity.
“What we don’t know is whether it reduces transmission from one person to another, so because of that we’ll have people continue to wear masks until we can demonstrate it does reduce transmission,” he said. “We’re getting it out to health care workers first and it will go to the general public over the next several months.”
The name on the vaccine doses received by Tuolumne County Public Health Department is Pfizer-biontech COVID-19 vaccine, Sergienko said.
A United Parcel Service driver named Levi Wilson, of Sonora, delivered the first batch of COVID-19 vaccine shots in Tuolumne County. His manager with UPS, based in Angels Camp, called The Union Democrat on Wilson’s behalf and said Wilson could not comment.
Wilson’s father, Robert Wilson, a former educator in Groveland who retired and moved to the Philippines in 2008, posted a photo on social media showing his son proudly delivering the first batch of the COVID-19 vaccine in Tuolumne County on Wednesday.
“He called me and said, ‘Dad, I’m delivering the vaccine. This is real,’ ” Robert Wilson said in a phone interview. Robert Wilson became emotional and started to cry when asked why he wanted to share the photo of the historic moment. He said he raised all of his children in Tuolumne County and felt the weight of the delivery’s significance.
“I was just so proud of him, it was like Santa Claus bearing gifts,” Robert Wilson said. “It’s not everyday you deliver something like that. That’s news Tuolumne County needed, because everybody is suffering from it and finally at last, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I told him, ‘Son, you’re making history for Tuolumne County.’ ”