--- title: The First Person in U.S. to Get COVID-19 Vaccine Reflects description: It can be uncomfortable to discuss the fact that too many communities of color in the U.S. lack access to acceptable health and medical care. Let’s discuss it anyway. canonical: https://time.com/6194500/first-person-covid-19-vaccine-us-essay/ author: Sandra Lindsay article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-07-07T18:22:06.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:42:37.592Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The First Person in U.S. to Get COVID-19 Vaccine Reflects og:description: It can be uncomfortable to discuss the fact that too many communities of color in the U.S. lack access to acceptable health and medical care. Let’s discuss it anyway. og:url: https://time.com/6194500/first-person-covid-19-vaccine-us-essay/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltebd119e8c6829195/698a337247ca383d753b9c2e/sandra-lindsay-first-covid-vaccine-oped.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: New York Nurse Who Was First To Receive Covid Vaccine, Receives Second Dose og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The First Person in U.S. to Get COVID-19 Vaccine Reflects twitter:description: It can be uncomfortable to discuss the fact that too many communities of color in the U.S. lack access to acceptable health and medical care. Let’s discuss it anyway. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltebd119e8c6829195/698a337247ca383d753b9c2e/sandra-lindsay-first-covid-vaccine-oped.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # I Was the First Person in America to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine. It Taught Me a Powerful Lesson > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. Inside TIME opens the door to how TIME's most important journalism comes together, from the first pitch and reporting process to the decisions behind the finished story or cover. 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Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine [Watch (HLS stream): The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BTNvQC2o.m3u8) (5:16)  _Published 2021-12-13. For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts._ by [Sandra Lindsay](https://time.com/author/sandra-lindsay/) ## Sandra Lindsay Lindsay is vice president of public health advocacy at Northwell Health Jul 7, 2022 6:22 PM UTC  Sandra Lindsay receives her second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center January 4, 2021 in New York City. Sandra Lindsay receives her second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center January 4, 2021 in New York City. Shannon Stapleton—Pool/Getty Images by [Sandra Lindsay](https://time.com/author/sandra-lindsay/) ## Sandra Lindsay Lindsay is vice president of public health advocacy at Northwell Health Jul 7, 2022 6:22 PM UTC I was always ready to say yes to the COVID-19 vaccine. I’d been following its development from the very beginning of the pandemic and said, again and again, that I’d happily get vaccinated. Working in critical care during the first deadly wave of the virus, my team and I had yearned for any relief from the frustration and sorrow we felt. We lived in the constant presence of death and loss, treating patients without treatment options while living in fear of contracting the virus ourselves. We needed the hope a COVID vaccine might deliver. When my employer, Northwell Health, asked for volunteers to get the shot on day one, I stepped forward to say, “Yes.” It ended up being a milestone in the history of the pandemic. In the first year they were available, vaccines saved [at least 19 million lives](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/06/24/how-many-lives-have-been-saved-by-covid-19-vaccines?utm%5Fcontent=ed-picks-article-link-1&etear=nl%5Fspecial%5F1&utm%5Fcampaign=a.coronavirus-special-edition&utm%5Fmedium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm%5Fsource=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm%5Fterm=6/25/2022&utm%5Fid=1214594) around the world. Mine may have been among the first. Later, some people would say I’d been used, coerced, even paid. But getting the first COVID-19 vaccine outside of a clinical trial was _not_ a mistake. The only mistake was thinking that, after the injection, I’d be going immediately back to work. The day had other plans. There was a press conference, and a whirlwind of interviews, then speaking engagements. When I said, “Yes,” to the vaccine, I unknowingly opened my eyes to a world of possibilities and advocacy. Risk, for example, looks different to me now. More than [6.3 million](https://covid19.who.int/) people worldwide have died from COVID-19 so far. As of this writing, almost [549 million](https://covid19.who.int/) people have been diagnosed with it. _That’s_ where risk and true danger exist–in people eschewing data and the evidence-based advice of medical professionals in favor of anger and falsehoods and fear, often fomented online. Saying yes also gave me a renewed sense of responsibility. I’ve heard so often that COVID-19 has pulled back the curtain on health inequities that I sometimes worry we’ll accept those inequalities as an entrenched fact that we cannot undo. I take seriously the opportunity I have to support public health in underserved communities and communities of color. This is my space; I’m a Black immigrant from Jamaica who came to this country to become a nurse. For some, it’s uncomfortable to discuss the fact that [too many](https://www.goodrx.com/healthcare-access/research/healthcare-deserts-80-percent-of-country-lacks-adequate-healthcare-access) communities of color in the United States lack access to acceptable health and medical care. Let’s discuss it anyway. Transforming health care deserts into healthy, robust communities with affordable, high-quality resources is a massive challenge. We may not find a perfect solution but it’s our responsibility to say yes to conversations about how we can remove barriers and inequities in our health care system.  Sandra Lindsay waves to spectators during a parade honoring essential workers for their efforts throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, July 7, 2021, in New York. John Minchillo—AP I felt empowered when I said yes to the COVID-19 vaccine—it was more than a dose of antibodies. It represented a hopeful, new beginning. That moment has been a gift, an opportunity to grow and expand my professional purpose. I certainly didn’t predict receiving a [Presidential Medal of Freedom](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/07/01/president-biden-announces-recipients-of-the-presidential-medal-of-freedom/). But In some ways, it was less of a choice than it was a seamless transition. Maybe my having said, “Yes,” will inspire others to do the same. ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en I think vaccines are misunderstood, and maybe it's because it seems like magic. That simplicity and the mystery of it is something that ends up creating a lot of skepticism. People are fooled by the speed. Everything that we knew when it was time to design a vaccine for COVID-19, we knew for so long, but the public had just become aware of it. If this would happen two years ago, we would not be ready. Saying that it happened overnight, it took two, three decades, at least. 2021 was the year when so many praised the miracle of vaccine development. In science, there is hardly ever a simple, quick fix. But this was truly a moment of the right fix - a brand new kind of vaccine technology - at exactly the right time. I started out in math, and I moved to biology. And after medical school, I saw one of the first cases of HIV in Tennessee back in 1982. And so the first part of my career was trying to understand the immunology of vaccine-enhanced disease and trying to make vaccines safer. I got interested in science when I was 16 years old. I was hooked on the idea that you could go to work and discover something that no one else in the world knows on any given day. It seems at 16, I thought that maybe I will be a scientist. I was always working with mRNA, I mean for 30 years at least. And I never wanted to develop a vaccine. I wanted to develop it for therapy. When I first came to Penn from the NIH, pure luck hit where I met Kati Karikó over a Xerox machine. And she told me she worked on RNA, and she could help us with our vaccine. Every experiment doesn't work, every hypothesis isn't good. It was a continuous flow of negative feedback. But we saw the potential of the RNA and neither of us would give up. Although mRNA can teach our cells to fight infection, it took doctors Karikó and Weissman 16 years to figure out how to use it safely in a vaccine. First when I made this RNA, actually I did not tell Drew Weissman, my colleague, because I thought that maybe I mixed up something. So I repeated the experiment and we could see that there was no inflammation in human cells. We're both scientists. We're not baseball players who cheer when we hit a homerun. We knew that it had great potential. But what we thought about is what are we going to do with it? Meanwhile, doctors Corbett and Graham spent years unlocking the structural secrets of viruses. One of the really important problems in coronaviruses that had not been solved is really simple. What does the coronavirus really look like to the immune system? And to figure that out, you have to be able to take a really high definition picture of the proteins that are on the surface of the coronavirus. And then do some protein engineering to stabilize the structure. At that moment, you realize that you have almost what is a universal strategy for creating a vaccine for coronaviruses. A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world on alert. What we said to each other, all's we need is a sequence and we're ready to go. We can make a vaccine in weeks and get it into people very quickly. The fact that we made a vaccine in 10 months, and has the potential to end this pandemic, will certainly stand out. "Do it mama!" (laughter) Most scientists never get to see a product actually used. And to watch the evening news and see the relief on healthcare providers getting immunized, those were special moments. I also get emotional when I got a letter from an elderly home, and they reported that they received the vaccine. There were like 200 elderly in that home. And nobody died. On social media, when children were going back to visiting their grandparents again. Seeing people reunited in that way, it was a very surreal moment. A surreal moment, and definitely worth celebrating, if only briefly before a return to work. These scientists are now trying to apply their game-changing discoveries to other diseases. Influenza, even cancer. 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