In 2021, a coalition of national museum and library associations awarded the Peale (Baltimore, Maryland) a Communities for Immunity grant. The goal of the project is for trusted, local institutions to engage their communities in order to boost COVID-19 vaccine confidence. Since being awarded the grant, we've been gathering stories from people about their experiences with COVID and getting the vaccine.
Speaker 1 (00:00): Hello.
Michelle Fisher (00:00): Hello.
Speaker 1 (00:02): Thank you for taking this time for me. All right. Can you say who you are and tell me a little bit about yourself?
Michelle Fisher (00:09): My name is Michelle Fisher. I work for the University of Maryland Hospital. I've been there over 30 years. I'm a mother of one grown son.
Speaker 1 (00:25): What community do you live in?
Michelle Fisher (00:27): I live in the Darley Park community.
Speaker 1 (00:30): Thank you. How has COVID vaccination affected your community? Would you say positive or negative or...
Michelle Fisher (00:37): The vaccination?
Speaker 1 (00:38): Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michelle Fisher (00:41): I think it's been positive. I, myself, am fully vaccinated and boostered.
Speaker 1 (00:49): Great. That's good to hear positive. You'd be surprised how many people think negative. I guess this would make these important. People have so many different points of view of that.
Michelle Fisher (00:58): Well, I didn't think that way when COVID first hit. I was totally against it. But then my father passed from COVID and it changed my outlook on vaccinations.
Speaker 1 (01:11): Okay. Did you have COVID yourself?
Michelle Fisher (01:15): Never.
Speaker 1 (01:16): Never. Great. Okay. How has the vaccination changed the way people interact?
Michelle Fisher (01:22): Well, for me, it's made me less antsy or paranoid about being around people. And since I work in the hospital environment, it's made me feel safer going into work, because I never stopped working where most of my coworkers stopped working for that first year, and I was the only one still going in. And so it's given me a little boost of confidence with going in and being around patients and people. So I think it was definitely a positive move.
Speaker 1 (02:05): Great. What are the social components of the pandemic that no one really talks about?
Michelle Fisher (02:14): Well, the fact that it has changed people's lives so drastically, especially when it comes to being social. Whereas you used to hug people and greet people with a handshake or whatever, now it's pretty much just wave or some people do this elbow thing, which I'm not into.
Speaker 1 (02:40): Right.
Michelle Fisher (02:42): And people crave hugs and touch and actually being around people and COVID has isolated a lot of people. And there are a lot of people who have not even been outside of their homes yet, because they're so paranoid about this because it's so unknown and nobody knows what exactly it is, what's going on. You get so much different information all day long. So, I mean it's definitely screwed people up socially.
Asset ID: 2022.05.18
Find a complete transcription on the Peale's website.
The views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the recordings for this project do not necessarily represent those of the Peale or the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
