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.
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The year of reckoning: How 2020 revealed the fault lines in American policing, and what we can expect next CNN 12/18/2020 © Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
Every morning, Victor Wahl walks into his office with a sense of dread. © Riverside Police Department Riverside, Illinois, Police Chief Tom Weitzel
Months of intense protests and heightened scrutiny have left the acting police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, like many in his shoes, on edge about what lies ahead. © Mark Makela/Getty Images Demonstrators gather in protest near the location where Walter Wallace, Jr. was killed by two police officers on October 27, 2020 in Philadelphia. I m fearful to find a bunch of resignations on my desk, said Wahl, whose department has lost twice the number of officers this year compared to previous years.
This article was published on Friday, December 18, 2020 in ProPublica.
Though African Americans are being hospitalized for COVID-19 at more than triple the rate of white Americans, wariness of the new vaccine is higher in the Black population than in most communities. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlighted communities of color as a critical population to vaccinate. But ProPublica found little in the way of concrete action to make sure that happens.
It will be up to states to make sure residents get the vaccine, but ProPublica reviewed the distribution plans of the nine states with the most Black residents and found that many have barely invested in overcoming historic mistrust of the medical establishment and high levels of vaccine hesitancy in the Black community. Few states could articulate specific measures they are taking to address the vaccine skepticism.