“I work every day on a Petri dish,” said Bradley, an internist from Savannah, Georgia, who has treated more than a hundred coronavirus patients. “I’m at great risk.”
Since his job endangered him, Bradley has been extremely careful in his personal life. He hasn’t stepped foot in a restaurant, gone to the gym, or made a trip since March. Even worse, he he became a grandfather during the pandemic and has been unable to have his first two grandchildren, born in April and July.
On July 27, Bradley’s team made history when it administered the first shot in the first phase 3 clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine in the United States.
That patient was Dawn Baker, a news presenter for the CNN affiliate WTOC.
“He’s really a remarkable human being,” Baker said. “A more attentive doctor could not be found.”
Bradley’s team continued to enroll more than a thousand volunteers in coronavirus vaccine clinical trials for Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax, but Bradley never obtained a coronavirus vaccine.
Everything changed on Wednesday, when the time finally came for the sleeve to roll up and take the Pfizer vaccine, just days after it received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“All that time, all that hard work afterwards, I got it,” Bradely said.
Amazing texts from “friends of doctors”
The night before his vaccination, Bradley received startling texts from some of his “doctor friends.”
They wanted to know if he was sure he wanted the vaccine. They suggested that maybe I should wait for other people to take it to see how they did it.
His answer was unequivocal.
“No, I don’t want to wait. I don’t want to wait. Every day is an opportunity to catch Covid and basically die. No, I don’t want to wait,” Bradley said.
Over the years, Bradley has become accustomed to asking questions of hesitant patients, but not of “practicing physicians with highly trained training.”
“This phobia or hesitation is not limited to uninformed and non-medical people,” he said.
“I’m worried (will the vaccine) change my DNA? Or that I can’t get the chip out? No, I’m not,” he said.
Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines, the only two to date to have received emergency authorization from the FDA, use the same scientific approach to activating the immune system. In their clinical trials, tens of thousands of participants received vaccines from companies and had no serious side effects.
But these participants were followed for months, not years, which causes some people to worry about the unknown long-term consequences of the shootings.
While Bradley acknowledges the lack of long-term data, he missed the opportunity to get the vaccine for two reasons.
First, vaccines have historically not had long-term safety issues. When people have had bad reactions, it is usually shortly after getting the shot.
Second, any risk that the coronavirus vaccine may pose, states that the risk is greatly offset by the risk of what could happen if you took Covid-19.
He is known to people who have died of Covid-19. He has seen others survive after suffering for months in the intensive care unit.
Some of these have not yet fully recovered months later.
“That’s why I keep telling people,‘ You don’t want this. ’Even if you go through it, there are all sorts of things, like brain fog and blood clots. blocked coronary arteries and needs bypass surgery, ”Bradley said. “It’s scary there.”
That’s why the decision to get vaccinated was easy.
“I see it as a matter of course. I really do,” he said.
The big day
Wednesday at 6 a.m., Bradley arrived at St. Louis Hospital. Joseph / Candler to receive the shot of Covid-19.
He brought with him a very special person: his daughter, Dr. Brooke Halpern, the mother of one of the grandchildren he has never hugged.
Her daughter joined her doctor’s office a few months ago, just as Covid-19 rates began to skyrocket.
The decision was also easy for her.
“I couldn’t be more excited to be able to get the vaccine,” Halpern said. “We’re already at risk every day with patients, and now I can have a little more ease going to work and not bringing any viruses home to my family.”
Thirty minutes later, father and daughter received the vaccines.
They were both euphoric.
“It’s very deep. It’s so simple, but it’s deep,” he said. “That’s the hope to get back to normal.”
When Baker heard the good news that his doctor had been vaccinated, he said he was relieved.
“It’s just a relief for me to go to work with him day in and day out and take care of all of us, that he can be protected,” Baker said. “I am very happy for him and for all the health workers who are prioritized.”
“The real heroes”
Now that Bradley is being vaccinated, he said he is “reaping the benefits” of the “true heroes”: the thousands of volunteers in the clinical trials who volunteered to try the two vaccines, which turned out to be about 95% effective.
“I told them all along that they were heroes, but now they look like geniuses,” he said.
As hopeful as it may be, he says the return to normalcy will mean a lot more work, as the virus has exploded in the United States.
“I call it a plague, it’s a pandemic, but it’s a plague out of the Bible,” he said. “It’s affecting everyone and we have to overcome it together.”
But to do that will require the American public to trust the vaccine, and Bradley worries that “crazy politics” is already sowing significant distrust.
“It will continue to be a challenge to get most people to get this vaccine,” he said.
He said he hopes people will come to understand that without the vaccine, people will continue to die thousands of people every day in the United States, as they are now.
“It’s literally a matter of time before it reaches everyone, except now we finally have a solution,” he said.
In about a month, when the full effects of the vaccine begin, Bradley plans to make the restaurant reservation he has been avoiding since March. You will be able to enter an examination room without fear of contracting the virus and dying.
And he will be able to do what he has found most lacking.
“I’ll be able to go hug (my) grandchildren,” he said. “Be like a normal, real person again.”