The 100,000th: 93-year-old’s inoculation marks milestone in hospital’s vaccine efforts

EDINBURG — “I’m excited. I’m grateful. I’m blessed.”

Those are the words of Marjorie Porter, a 93-year-old Mission native who received her first dose of the COVID-19 shot Monday morning, marking DHR Health’s 100,000th distributed vaccine.

That’s 100,000 people who are more protected from the virus; 100,000 contributing to slowing the spread of the virus; 100,000 who are a step closer to returning to a semblance of normalcy.

Porter’s been longing to share meals with her friends at the dining hall of John Knox Village, a Weslaco retirement community where she’s a resident. She lives alone and for almost a year now, has been eating her meals alone.

“I have been having meals served to my room as opposed to going to the dining room at John Knox, and I am going to start eating in the dining room again, and just have more of a social life,” Porter said with a smile beaming through her mask.

“The vaccine has been a direct blessing, and I’ll be glad when everybody can get it,” she said.

As DHR Health Pharmacist Annette Ozuna gave Porter her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine at the auditorium of Edinburg Conference Center at Renaissance, other community members were getting their dose on the other side of the wall. By the end of the day, DHR Health planned to distribute 2,500 vaccines.

Porter’s vaccination is just ahead of the one-year anniversary of former President Donald J. Trump declaring the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency on March 14, 2020. Since then, nearly 79,000 people in Hidalgo County have contracted the virus, and 2,467 have died from it.

Her vaccination also comes about three months after the first batch of Pfizer vaccines reached Rio Grande Valley soil on Dec. 14, 2020. Just a couple seasons prior, the region was a national hot spot for virus cases and deaths. At one point last summer, the Valley held the highest death rate in the state.

DHR Health had to open three COVID-19 wards, and refrigerating trucks were necessary to hold the dead.

Witnessing Porter receive her vaccine was an emotional moment for local healthcare workers in the audience that morning.

DHR Health Pharmacist Ron Ozuna, one of the leaders of the institution’s vaccination initiative, said watching the 100,000th vaccine was, to him, the definition of hope.

“To see a 93-year-old receive her vaccine when just three months ago we didn’t know how quickly and how effectively we could get this all done was definitely emotional,” Ozuna said.

Just a few months ago, Ozuna walked into one of the hospital’s COVID-19 wards and saw how many members of his community were suffering from the virus; he saw how many needed tubes and machines to help them breathe.

At that point in the pandemic, he said intensive care unit staff were responding to code blues — codes alerting that patients’ hearts had given up — nearly every five to 10 minutes.

“This is a huge milestone that we have reached, and it is all because of the collaboration and dedication of all the leaders we have here,” Ozuna said.

Before Porter was vaccinated, the hospital’s pharmacists and vaccine registration team were honored. Local elected leaders were also recognized.

DHR Health Chairman of the Board Dr. Carlos Cardenas said teamwork has been the weapon keeping the community protected from COVID-19.

“We as a community have come together again and again and again to defeat what we can’t see,” Cardenas said to an audience of local leaders, DHR healthcare staff and community members who had been vaccinated just moments ago and were completing their 15 minutes of observation.

He emphasized the importance of vaccines to the crowd and marveled at how centuries of healthcare research have led to this moment in which a COVID-19 vaccine that was pioneered within months could be widely distributed to people by the thousands per day.

Cardenas noted the findings of British physician Edward Jenner, who discovered in 1796 that cowpox could build a person’s immunity to smallpox, an extremely infectious disease that killed about three out of every 10 people.

He also spoke about polio, a paralyzing disease in the early 1900s that disrupted the lives of many of the audience’s grandparents and great grandparent’s. It took decades for scientists to come up with a vaccine for polio; researchers began working on it in the ’30s, and an effective vaccine wasn’t created until 1953 by virus researcher Jonas Edward Salk.

“A year and four days ago, we began down this journey with a hope and a prayer,” Cardenas said, “that we would have a vaccine that would give us the sword that we need along with public health measures that we were already implementing to help knock this disease on its butt.”