Joy Henningsen
Dr. Joy Henningsen is a diagnostic radiologist at the Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and a clinical assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
On December 17, she received the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine along with other hospital workers at the Birmingham VA Medical Center.
Henningsen says she eagerly signed up to receive the vaccine as soon as it became available. After a temperature check, she says the injection process went quickly and that she barely felt the shot.
For now, she says her day-to-day behavior will remain the same: avoiding bars or restaurants, wearing masks outside of her home, and practicing good sanitization, until a majority of Americans have also received the vaccine.
Dr. Joy Henningsen works as a diagnostic radiologist at Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on December 17 along with other personnel at the facility. The Birmingham VA Medical Center received some of the first shipments of the vaccine in the U.S.
Henningsen decided to share her story in a first-person article she wrote for
Business Insider because of her experiences interpreting chest and lung images of patients with COVID-19. She noted that while as a radiologist she s not on the front lines in caring for COVID-19 patients, she sees the damage caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus through their images.