The shot heard ’round the world

Headshot of Michael Armini
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OK maybe that’s a stretch, but I’m prone to exaggeration. It comes with the job. Still, I thought I’d share a behind the scenes account of last Tuesday, which was an example of Northeastern at its best. 

I was heading into the office and, around 8 am, I got several text messages in rapid succession. “Vaccine has arrived at Cabot!” was the first one. The second one said, “200 doses just arrived!” One of our stellar campus photographers, Ruby Wallau, hustled over to the Cabot Testing Center and snapped shots of the box and the vials—including this photo on the left of site supervisor Aleks Karosas placing the vaccine into cold storage. 

A collage featuring someone storing a box of vaccines, a sign and a line for vaccines, and a

It just so happened that our vaccine task force was meeting with President Aoun and other senior leaders that morning. That conversation immediately turned to: How soon can we get shots into arms? We already knew Cabot would be the site of vaccinations for Northeastern, but frankly the state had not been clear about when the first batch would arrive. Within hours, colleagues in Facilities got the Northeastern sign shop to create the sign you see above, and physical distancing stickers were quickly applied to the floor at six-foot intervals.

As we reached out to 200 eligible recipients (primarily those working in our Cabot and Huntington Ave testing centers) we wanted to make sure to capture that first shot. Caitlin O’Donnell and Haley Steele from my office—the closest thing Northeastern has to SEAL Team operators—grabbed a slew of Northeastern-branded banners, ran over to Cabot, and set them up behind two folding chairs. 

But who would be first? Well, as the song goes . . . Her name was Lola. At least that’s what she goes by. Her full name is Iloisa Teixeira, one of the staff people who began working at the Cabot Testing Center the day we opened it back in early August. When the injection took place, at 1:04 pm, Ruby Wallau was joined by Matt Modoono to make sure we captured it from all angles. After the shot, all of us on site, including President Aoun, burst into spontaneous applause.

Yes, the past year has been rough. Fortunately, peer-reviewed science is beginning to make things better.

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