HJNO May/Jun 2025

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAY / JUN 2025 31 Allen Not as good as oxygen lines freezing over. We used so much oxygen in the hos- pital that the oxygen lines froze. Ferguson Oh, I forgot about that. Allen Y’all remember that? We had to put a sprinkler outside on the oxygen deliv- ery system to try to keep it thawed so the oxygen would keep flowing in the hospital. That’s how much oxygen we were drawing out of that tank outside. Gremillion For me, personally, we had had good friends of ours whose son died here. He was 21. And, just to see the effects of that … Of course, it wasn’t just that, but when you go through that — when it’s a close personal friend, and their son dies fromCOVID — the overwhelming response is we’ve got to do something because, not that people aren’t taking it seriously, they just don’t know. The, “I’m in college, and I’m used to just going out with my friends, and I should be able to do that. I should be able to go play volley- ball. I should be able to go sit down and just hang out.”And you can’t. And that’s so hard to get over to that generation. If I had been that age, it had been hard to get over to me. Ferguson To be brutally honest, I was a skeptic. When we first started hearing talks of vaccine development, I just thought of, like, big pharmaceutical companies rush- ing to get a payday because they’re going to be the first to the finish line with a product that’s poorly tested. But, by the time it was available, I was — on the first day that it was available — at the Lake withmy sleeve rolled up, like, “Give it to me. Right now.” Allen I think that’s what it is. I mean, it was an emergency use authorization — fraction of the research that would normally be done for a development — but I think what led us all there was a hope maybe this is the one, and maybe this is going to do it. Gremillion The first thing I did was readThe Great [Influenza] about the pandemic in the early 1900s. And if you read that, what you find out is that the big thing that turned it around was vaccines, developing vaccines. That’s when vaccines started being devel- oped. And it really saved the day for them in very early days. So, I think that I realized … after reading the book, I said, “This is what’s going to do it. It’s going to help at least.” Ford I mean, we were all there on the first day, and a lot of people don’t know the risk, they don’t know what this looks like. You don’t know what it looks like until some- body in your family or your son dies and you’re like, “Oh my God.” Allen I think we asked a lot of the public. I do. I think we asked a lot of the public because that was a leap of faith. If you didn’t see what was happening, if you didn’t under- stand how an mRNA vaccine might work, these things … I think that, you know, is there any treatments that we give patients that are universally accepted — everybody buys in? But again, it was easy for us. We saw what was going on. This was an easy … this was a no-brainer for all of us. n To explore the full oral history collection, visit ololrmc.com/ stories-of-strength.