Yves Duroseau is the head of emergency medecine at Lenox Hills Hospital in Manhattan.
As it is in the UK, in the US frontliner and nursing home residents get priority to receive the Covid vaccine. Yves Duroseau is the first doctor that has received the Covid vaccine, alongside with other four healthcare workers.
Dr Duroseau is the head of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan who has spent months caring for the desperately ill, worried for his safety and that of his colleagues.
He is the first doctor and the second healthcare worker in the US to receive a vaccine against Covid. It happened after three days after the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization of the Pfizer BioTech drug. Those vaccinations precede those announce by Biden.
Asking about his feelings as the first doctor receiving the vaccine from Pfizer, “Going in today, I was just feeling very hopeful.”
Frontline healthcare workers and elderly nursing home residents have been given priority as the US rolls out the vaccine. Healthcare workers across the country – including in California, Texas and Florida – received their first doses of a two-dose inoculation today.
Duroseau said he was fortunate to stay well during the pandemic. He also experienced the feeling that some of his colleagues in the emergency department became infected, though none required hospitalization.
As a Black man, Duroseau said he felt a special responsibility to receive his vaccination publicly. “There is a lot of reservation within certain communities and reluctance to be vaccinated. Within those groups, some people are very vulnerable or who have disproportionately been impacted by Covid. And it’s so very especially important to get that message out to those communities.”