Palm Beach Daily News
Despite a year of curfews, stay-at-home orders and a rise in COVID-19 cases as winter residents returned to Palm Beach, the 2020-21 season saw a light at the end of a very long tunnel.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis announced in January that seniors 65 and over would be the first group inoculated with the new COVID-19 vaccine, town officials were ready. An infrastructure and distribution system was put in place in September that allowed the town to secure an initial 1,000 vaccines for its residents.
On Jan. 5, the first doses of the Moderna vaccine were administered to eligible residents.
Fire-Rescue Chief Darrel Donatto said 240 vaccines, which included leftovers from the last batch, were administered. Folks signed up two day ago, so they were happy, he said, adding that because the town reached out to folks on the wait list, not a lot of people showed up at the South Fire Station vaccination site who did not have appointments.
In the meantime, if you are anxious about whether there are enough COVID-19 vaccines to go around, how long they work and if you must be concerned about mutant strains of the virus, you are not alone.
Those questions and more have been pouring in to Town Council members, who, on Friday, held a video conference to address residents most pressing questions
Palm Beach officials: Preparation meant town was ready once COVID-19 vaccines became available
Adriana Delgado
When the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci said in September that five of the six vaccine candidates were already in phase 3 trials, Palm Beach officials and staff got to work.
And two months after Palm Beach Fire Rescue Chief Darrel Donatto told town council members he was very optimistic about the town having the first COVID-19 vaccines as early as December, the town sent out an alert on Thursday announcing that residents 65 and older could now make an appointment online to receive the first Moderna vaccines starting Tuesday.
Only residents 65 and older are eligible for vaccinations under an executive order issued last month by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which restricts COVID-19 vaccinations in the first phase to nursing home residents and staff, people 65 and older, medical workers and anyone they deem extremely vulnerable” to COVID-19.
Smith was born in a time when there was no influenza vaccine, and no hope for one.
Recalling what she had been told of her childhood, Smith said her father, Harold Will, was stationed in France during World War I when the flu hit, so her grandmother practically kidnapped her and her mother, taking them out of Syracuse and into Watertown, New York, when the pandemic started getting worse. Smith’s sister, Katherine, was already living outside Syracuse with an aunt.
When Jane Smith was born on June 22, 1918, in a hospital in Syracuse, New York, a new and deadly influenza virus had begun to create panic around the world.
Her mother, Catherine Will, fell ill with the flu in August, and 2-month-old Jane also started having symptoms of the disease, presumably transmitted by her mother’s breast milk.
Smith survived the flu, but Catherine did not. She died at the age of 25 in November 1918.
The flu pandemic, which raged from 1918 to 1919, is estimated to have eventually infected 500 million people about one-third of the world s population, and killed 50 million, including about 675,000 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.