First New York healthcare worker gets vaccine
Sandra Lindsay, an ICU nurse, was given the vaccine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, New York, an early epicenter of the country's COVID-19 outbreak, receiving applause on a livestream with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
"It didn't feel any different from taking any other vaccine," Lindsay said. "I feel hopeful today, relieved. I feel like healing is coming. I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history."
The vaccine, developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, won emergency-use approval from federal regulators on Friday (December 11) after it was found to be 95% effective in preventing illness in a large clinical trial.
The first 2.9 million doses began to be shipped to distribution centers around the country on Sunday (December 13), just 11 months after the United States documented its first COVID-19 infections.
As of Monday, the United States had registered 16,286,343 cases and 299,489 deaths from the virus.
