By Molly Jong-Fast, Vogue

I have been thinking about the Pfizer COVID vaccine since August of 2020, when I became patient 1133 in the Pfizer trial. A lot has happened since then. I got the placebo in August, got the real vaccine in February, my husband got it in February, and my 17-year-old got it in March. As each member of the family was vaccinated, our lives moved a little closer to normal. My 17-year-old has asthma, and two weeks after his second vaccine shot, I started to relax about him going to school and being with his friends.

But my 13-year-old twins were still unvaccinated. For a while it felt as though, while the rest of us might be moving on, they would be stuck with all the pandemic precautions. But it might feel even more unfortunate, since the rest of us would begin letting down our guard. I still felt uncomfortable taking them on airplanes or to see their grandparents. I still had a nagging feeling when they went to school. Sure, I understood that the chances of them dying of the virus were vanishingly small, but I also knew that long COVID was a real thing in children and there were some cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome caused by the virus. While I understood the virus wasn’t as dangerous for them, I felt worried about sending them to camp or school, and I knew they could still spread the virus to others if they became infected.

But more than that, having them unvaccinated just left me with this nagging feeling that not everyone was as safe as they could be from the virus, which has already killed 585,000 Americans—52,366 just in the state of New York and 32,991 just in New York City. That is a lot of deaths for one city in one year. Most people think of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a massive historical trauma; the total death toll for the Troubles over the decades between the late sixties and 1998 has been estimated at about 3,500. I have not forgotten—I don’t think I’ll ever forget—the days in spring 2020 when the refrigerated trucks in New York City were running out of space for new corpses. In total, one in every 250 New Yorkers has died of COVID. No one I know has been untouched by death.

On May 10, the FDA granted Pfizer emergency use authorization for adolescents ages 12-15. In New York, COVID vaccines started for children 12-15 on Thursday, May 13. I took my 13-year-old twins to get their first dose of the vaccine on Friday, May 14, at 3:50 p.m. Since March 2020, their lives have been a weird patchwork of abbreviated experiences. Sure, they are privileged in every way and haven’t suffered the way many children who’ve lost their parents or their homes have, but their lives have been at best weird and at worst very lonely. As much as I ache for normal, I worry that they don’t even really remember normal.

I came up with the brilliant idea to get them vaccinated under the blue whale suspended from the ceiling of the ocean room in New York’s grand multi-block-long Museum of Natural History, the one with the statue of Teddy Roosevelt out front. The Museum of Natural History—like Yankee Stadium and other cultural institutions in New York City— is offering free passes to people who visit the sites to get their shots. But it turns out that other people had that idea, too, so instead of a five-minute wait at the Javits Center or a 30-second wait at our local CVS—truly, you can get it just about anywhere right now in New York City—we had a two-hour wait at the museum. But it didn’t matter. There was something magical and also a little sad about the makeshift vaccination center set up under the life-sized blue whale. Over the last 14 months there had been a lot of these odd pandemic sites, like the field hospital in Central Park or the hospital ship in the Hudson River. They always make me a little sad.

Something about visiting this landmark of countless young people’s childhoods in New York made me feel the poignancy of this moment even more acutely. “The best thing,” says Holden Caulfield of the museum in The Catcher in the Rye, is that “everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish…. Nobody’s be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” Today, of course, everyone in New York, everyone in the world, is different—and different in ways that we haven’t even begun to grasp.

We’ve lived with the pandemic for so long that I worry we’ve become numb to the sheer magnitude of the loss and suffering around us. What are the effects of living through a pandemic on children? Will they be traumatized by the year they had to stay in their apartment? Will they be more careful with their health? Will they be a generation of thrill seekers? Or a generation of hypochondriacs? It’s impossible to know.

But we do know that normal is on the horizon, and it feels even better than I thought it would. We waited on the endless line down Central Park West into the subway and through the basement of the Museum of Natural History. We sat with a volunteer who looked at their passports to make sure they were at least 12. Then we waited on another line and went into the room with the seal and sea lion dioramas and the enormous whale hanging from the ceiling. When we got to the little makeshift cubicle, the twins were a little nervous. I held their hands while the hypodermic needles slid into their arms. My husband stood next to me. It felt like an important moment in putting this pandemic behind us.

One of the twins complained of arm pain, but that was it for the side effects. In three weeks, my twins will have their second shot. Two weeks after that they will, if the research holds, have a 100% immunity to the COVID virus. That means that in five weeks, our family will be able to move in the world, largely in the way we did in the before times. I will likely encourage masking in crowded spaces and in school, but this nightmare is almost over, and I can’t wait to take my 13-year-olds to the movies and on airplanes and to meet their unvaccinated one-year-old baby cousin. We don’t know how this pandemic will change our kids, but we can vaccinate them so we don’t need to know how COVID could ravage them.

  Coronavirus, COVID-19, vaccine