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Even President-elect Joe Biden and outraged Democratic governors across the country have expressed considerable dissatisfaction and anger over the slow distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, writes New York Times bestseller Jerry Oppenheimer. wrote biographies of American icons like Clinton and Kennedy.
“I was scared for a while and tried to warn,” Biden said, “the vaccine distribution and vaccination process is not going as fast as it should … It will take us several years, not several months, to vaccinate American citizens.”
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer says: “Slow work by federal agencies is hampering the process … and the White House appears to be the main brake.” And New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “The people of the country don’t trust the federal government with the vaccination process.”
What happened in New York?
“What happened in New York only came about through communication between the federal, state, and local governments, the voluntary vaccinations of people, and the rapid dissemination of information, things necessary in any pandemic,” said Judith Leavitt, professor of medical history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The pandemic, which could have claimed thousands of lives, began in 1947. on February 24, when forty-seven-year-old American businessman Eugene Le Bar and his wife, on their way home to Maine, boarded a bus in Mexico on their way to New York.
During the five-day journey, the man fell ill. He had a headache and back pain, sore throat and a rash on the second day of the trip. Although he tried treatment with high doses of aspirin, the drugs did not help.
When Le Bar arrived in New York, his health was even worse. However, the couple decided to spend a few days in the city. They stayed at the hotel, touring the city’s famous landmarks, shopping and mingling with the New York crowd on crowded sidewalks and bustling stores.
These New Yorkers did not know that a man was carrying an incurable, deadly and easily contagious disease that would quickly spread panic in the most populous city in the country.
According to medical experts, the vaccine helps prevent smallpox. However, it causes too many side effects, so people at low risk of infection have not been vaccinated.
On March 5, Le Bar’s health deteriorated further and he was transferred from the hotel to the Bellevue hospital. The man’s high temperature and the spreading rash not only bothered the doctors, but also caused them great concern.
Most of them had never seen smallpox and there have been no cases of the disease in the city for decades. Three days later, at Bellevue Hospital, doctors decided to move Le Bar to Willard Parker, the city’s infectious disease hospital.
As stated in 1947. In a November report by Dr. Isreal Weinstein, the commissioner for health crises in New York City, physicians at Willard Parker Hospital did not initially decide among the four possible causes of the man’s condition.
The hypothesis that he had smallpox was rejected because Le Bar had a “clear vaccination scar.” The man’s primary skin biopsy showed no signs of smallpox. However, smallpox-like bodies were later found in other parts of the same biopsy.
On March 10, five days after Le Bar was transferred to Willard Parker Hospital, the man died. The bleeding, which is characteristic of smallpox, was detected at necropsy.
While Le Bar was in the hospital, two patients were admitted: Ismael Acosta, twenty-seven years old, who had a pig, and a girl of almost two years with croup laryngitis. Not both were vaccinated against smallpox.
They recovered quickly and were released home. However, eleven days after Le Bar’s death, the girl was admitted to Willard Parker’s hospital for chickenpox-like skin rashes. The following day, a rash, as well as chickenpox, was thought to have appeared on I. Acosta’s skin.
However, other laboratory tests revealed many lesions characteristic of smallpox.
Touching, coughing, or sneezing is enough to spread deadly smallpox. A terrible rash can cover the entire body of the patient.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), only during the 20th century. about 300 million people died of smallpox. And it wasn’t until the 1980s that the WHO announced that smallpox had been eradicated.
All staff and patients at Willard Parker Hospital were vaccinated. A re-examination of the medical history of Eugene Le Baro, who traveled from Mexico to New York, revealed that the man had died of smallpox and infected I. Acosta and a two-year-old girl.
All the guests of the hotel where Le Bar stayed were found and vaccinated.
However, the smallpox began to increase: Acosta’s wife, twenty-six years old, three middle-aged men (43 to 60 years old) who were lying in Bellevue hospital while Acosta was there, a four-year-old boy who was in Willard Parker’s hospital that day. when Le Bar died.
This child infected three more people: a sixty-two-year-old nun, a five-year-old boy, and a two-year-old girl. At that time, 12 cases of the disease were related to the New York smallpox outbreak: nine in New York City itself and three in Milbruck. Of the nine people in New York, two died. It was Le Bar and Mrs. Acosta.
In 1947, the last smallpox outbreak in New York was recorded in 1875. About two thousand people died during his time.
1947 On April 4, when smallpox was diagnosed in Acosta, the situation was reported to the United States Public Health Service. To find out if the disease had spread, people who were traveling on the same bus with the Le Bar family were contacted, as well as other people with whom the man had contact during the trip. None of these people were found to become ill. Ms. Le Bar was found in Maine and her health was also good because she had been vaccinated.
The same April 4 was Good Friday. Two days later, the city’s annual Easter Parade would take place in New York. If at least one person with smallpox attended a fundraiser, the consequences would be devastating.
So the New York Department of Health came up with a plan to vaccinate all New Yorkers, and the department’s laboratory office began working on an emergency program.
The New York media (newspapers, radio and television) immediately began to publish reports calling for immediate vaccination, as all agencies of the health department and hospitals in the city worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to deal with the situation.
At the urgent request of William O’Dwyer, a New York mayor of Irish descent, the country’s vaccine manufacturers began working around the clock, packing large quantities of the vaccine and shipping all their supplies to New York.
About 650,000 doses of the vaccine were immediately available. The US military sent several hundred thousand more doses to New York from other states in the country.
Dr. I. Weinstein vaccinated Mayor W. O’Dwyer against television cameras. April 21 Then-United States President Harris S. Truman also arrived in New York, who, according to media reports, also loosened his sleeve.
Pharmacists who distributed vaccines to doctors hired by the private sector also contributed. Vaccination points were available in all police stations, health department buildings, city hospitals and clinics, where residents were vaccinated free of charge.
Community organizations have also created local vaccination centers. These centers have also been established in factories, offices and union headquarters.
However, with the onset of vaccine shortages, there has been panic among New Yorkers who have not yet been vaccinated.
At some vaccination points, as The New York Times wrote, “the crowd reacted fiercely to the doctor’s report that vaccines had run out and the police had difficulty dispersing several hundred people gathered at the vaccination point.”
There was also a case in which a young woman posing as a nurse “vaccinated” 500 people with water in an attempt to impress her boyfriend. She was sent to Bellevue Hospital for a mental evaluation.
More than 6,350,000 New Yorkers have been vaccinated in less than a month. Of these, more than five million were vaccinated in the first two weeks after the mayor’s request to be vaccinated.
“Never before have so many people been vaccinated in a city in such a short period of time,” wrote Weinstein, then acting health commissioner.
According to a Bloomberg article based on data collected before January 2, 4.2 million doses of COVID-19 have been vaccinated in the United States since vaccination began on December 14.
In his report, Weinstein said that what happened in New York could be a “great catastrophe.” All the illnesses in New York were serious, so “it is incredible that only twelve illnesses were recorded during the outbreak,” the doctor wrote.
After a universal vaccination campaign in New York nearly 75 years ago, the city’s health department received countless calls to report smallpox, which was actually just chickenpox. Others called to express their displeasure with the illnesses they said were caused by the vaccine, but there were no deaths.
The smallpox outbreak in New York also caught the attention of Hollywood.
According to a 1948 article in Cosmopolitan magazine entitled “Smallpox: A Killer Who Chases New York”, a semi-documentary film “A Killer Who Chases New York” was made and filmed in the same city. It appeared in theaters in the 1950s.
But the producers changed history. In the film, a woman played by actress Evelyn Keyes caused a smallpox outbreak that caused panic in the city. She arrived in New York from Cuba with stolen diamonds worth $ 50,000, and although she felt bad, the protagonist did not know she had smallpox. This is how the disease spreads.
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