“I was the nurse who fulfilled my professional duty to serve the community in need,” Lindsay says. “I protected my patients, and led by example, demonstrating courage and inspiring others to embrace science and be part of the solution.”

Sandra Lindsay, an immigrant from Jamaica, has been a nurse since 1994. When she received her vaccine she was the Director of Nursing in the Critical Care division at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, New York. On December 14, 2020, she was the first person to receive an authorized COVID-19 vaccine in the United States. She had made it clear to everyone around her that she was eager to be vaccinated, whenever it was available. She didn’t know she was going to be the first, but she embraced it because she knows what’s at stake, after managing the expansion of intensive care services at her hospital at “ground zero” of the coronavirus pandemic in New York. She researched the vaccine before she accepted it. She knows that as a Black woman it is important to model her confidence in the vaccine. Now pursuing a doctorate in health sciences, Lindsay is focusing on solving some of the systemic issues that make Black and Latinx people more susceptible to chronic illness.

Vaccines are an example of empowering the collective, because they work most effectively when a critical number of the population are vaccinated, otherwise we have to keep taking boosters, and because the virus keeps alive in groups of people the virus WILL keep mutating until maybe the vaccine doesn’t work anymore. So it’s important that everyone who can get vaccinated, DOES get vaccinated. The needs of the collective influencing the actions of the individual, this idea keeps coming up. It seems fundamental to the idea of justice. That our own comfort, our own need, is not more important than the survival of a population. It is the idea that competition needs to be subservient to cooperation. But here’s the thing, we do benefit individually when the species survives. And that is the level that we need to be looking at things now: the species. Not the individual, the couple, the family, the tribe…because human beings will NOT survive if we limit our values to those smaller units. This is how we are being tested by nature.

This print was published in April 2021.

You can read more about Sandra Lindsay at these links:

https://www.shondaland.com/act/news-politics/a35651431/sandra-lindsay-first-covid-vaccine/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/12/14/sandra-lindsay-first-covid-vaccine/