Credit Liam Niemeyer / Ohio Valley Resource Phyllis Gibbs wasn’t sure until recently that she’d be here, just a few moments away from receiving a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. “Do you feel sick today?”
Gibbs then walked over to one of the nurses inside the Kentucky Dam Village Convention Center in rural western Kentucky — a place that once held a pre-pandemic political rally for statewide Democrats — that has now been transformed into a regional vaccination site designed to dole out hundreds of Pfizer vaccines a day.
And Pfizer was the only vaccine Gibbs would get. She wouldn’t get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it was “paused” on April 13, and she’s heard bad stories about the side effects from the second Moderna vaccine dose. She said some of her family is totally against the vaccines — “they’re kind of hard-headed,” she laughs — and some in her part of conservative Ballard County trust “homeopathic” treatments rather than traditional medicine.