Evan Bush, Sandi Doughton

Dr. Thuan Ong hunched before colleagues and cameras with hands clasped tight between his knees and his eyes trained on UW Medical Center’s gray hospital carpet.

Ong’s voice quavered with emotion amid complicated reflections as he waited to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

“I feel very privileged,” said Ong, who since February has ventured into long-term care facilities where the most vulnerable have suffered — from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and from the lonely inhumanity that accompanies it.

And so he felt sorrow also, for colleagues who have been at times “afraid and desperate,” for patients lost, and for those whose pain is forthcoming, as cases of coronavirus surge while they wait for the vaccine.

“That’s the weight we’re all feeling; the sadness that we can’t get it to them yet,” Ong said in an interview later.

Ong was one of 13 workers in health care who were among the first in Washington state to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Tuesday in an event at UW Medical Center. The event, which gave each worker a moment to speak, highlighted the complicated emotions of fatigued front-line workers, who experience both hope and catharsis with the vaccine’s arrival, but also deep concern over what’s to come amid a fall surge in hospitalizations.

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