A great day and a sign of great things to come!

What a great day! I had several calls from patients today who called just to say they had received the vaccine. Thank you for making my day. They are here! Over 600,000 just arrived in Hamilton. I heard through the grape vine that the Guelph Wellington Public Health Unit now has the capacity to vaccinate everyone in this region within in 2- 3 months. Such great leadership! My offering for tonight. A little bit of nostalgia. On March 8, 2020, I was returning home from a week spent in Florida with a dear friend. An annual trip for the last seven years, this 2020 trip was different. I spent so much of my time preoccupied with COVID-19. I kept trying to convince Canadians who were spending the winter in Florida to make their way home. I remember sitting on the beach with one couple who were worried about whether or not they would make it to visit their son in Italy….in April. They didn’t make the trip. I was sitting at the gate waiting for my flight home. I waited for hours and watched hundreds of people come and go. I was wearing a mask. A few other folks were wearing masks too. I felt like bit of an idiot sitting there. I remember sneezing. People around me got up and moved further away. A simple ordinary sneeze, an unusual and extraordinary reaction and I knew, at that moment that the world was no longer ‘normal’. Do you remember how crushing COVID 19 was on Italy? Do you remember watching images of elderly people hooked up to ventilators on their bellies? Do you remember images of patrons locked in their cabins on the Diamond Princess and watching the daily totals of new cases in China? Terrifying. I remember feeling this huge rush of panic when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11/20. That was almost a year ago, unbelievably enough. And here we sit, at the tail end of a second wave, fearful of a third wave as we approach that distinguished anniversary. It was a year of loss. We have lost so many of the freedoms we took for granted like heading into a grocery store with no fear, like sending our kids off to school without a second thought, like heading off to work and sharing lunch with our work colleagues, like eating in a restaurant, like travelling to Florida in 2021 or any other lost trip to somewhere else in the world. A year of suffering, loss, confusion and fear. But this next year, everything will change. We are about to be part of the massive roll out of COVID 19 vaccines. I know that people are divided on the issue of vaccines: those that are comfortable getting a vaccine, those that are vaccine hesitant and those that are against vaccines. Vaccines are the final and necessary tool needed for us to conquer COVID 19. Without them, the pandemic could linger for years, killing hundreds of millions of people and leaving economies in collapse. Science was ready for COVID 19. As an HIV physician treating HIV positive people since 1990, I have watched what science and technology is capable of. We have taken AIDS, a universally deadly disease, also caused by a virus, to a now chronic and manageable disease using powerful medications. I helped young people die throughout the nineties. Now I prescribe one pill once a day and these patients literally move on to live a normal life expectancy. Oh, that I could have handed these same medications to the dozens of patients who died under my care. As many in the world joined forces to end the AIDS pandemic, science developed new technologies and treatments never used before. For three decades, the scientific community has been developing messenger RNA technology. The time for these vaccines has come. Probably the most effective and safe vaccines ever created, the research and intelligence behind them has been decades in the making. With the world now throwing it’s intellectual and financial might at COVID-19, moving these vaccines through trials that started last February, before the pandemic was declared, was not rushed, it was resourced. We have been waiting for the opportunity to use this miraculous technology. Have no fear. These vaccines will get us back to a normal life. They are safe and we are ready to receive millions of them. We are ready. Join me as I roll up my sleeve! Anne-Marie Please share! For non-Facebook users, you can find this post here: https://braceletofhope.blogspot.com/ And if you'd like to help Bracelet of Hope work towards making sure that Lesotho has access to these vaccines, donate here: https://www.braceletofhope.ca/ways-to-