SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Stony Brook University's COVID-19 Distribution "Very Impressive"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

The process of getting a vaccination at Stony Brook University to prevent COVID-19 was amazingly well-organized. I had been concerned about getting to the site where shots were being given on the sprawling Stony Brook campus but signage was abundant. And traffic was directed by National Guard soldiers and Stony Brook University Police. 

There was an enormous number of people at various stations inside the campus building being used for vaccinations—many of them drawn from the various Health Sciences programs at Stony Brook. They were consistently helpful. 

Quite an activation of resources! Very impressive!

Getting an appointment wasn’t easy but I kept trying by calling the state’s “vaccination hotline” (at 833-697-4829). And, finally, I landed a slot.

I was given the shot—of the Pfizer vaccine—by a team two young women who attend the Stony Brook School of Nursing. I told them, as the needle was prepared, about being a journalist and having written articles about the founding of their school in the early 1970s.

I suggested they Google the name of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino to learn about why, largely because of his leadership, the Health Sciences programs at Stony Brook—including the School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and School of Dental Medicine—are unusual. Dr. Pellegrino pioneered interdisciplinary health science education and clinical care at Stony Brook as its vice president for health sciences.

When the needle went in, I didn’t feel it. It was the thinnest needle ever poked into me. I was told there might be moderate pain in my upper arm afterwards. As I write this, the next day, any pain has disappeared.

After the shot I was directed to a big room in which the newly vaccinated were to sit for 15 minutes, to wait to make sure they were OK. Chairs were socially-distanced. On a big screen, a video program was being played on the history of health sciences at Stony Brook.

It was déjà vu time. It brought me back to covering Stony Brook way back—and getting to know its students, faculty and administrators—and especially the visionary Dr. Pellegrino. 

The arrival of Stony Brook University was a shock for some communities and people in Suffolk. There was “town-gown” conflict. The top administrators of the university met with the top editors of the daily Long Island Press and asked, an editor later told me, if they could assign a reporter who might be “sensitive” regarding the conflict and also what was happening at the university. At that time, 1969, I had begun this column, published every Sunday in The Press, reported on Suffolk politics and government and did investigative reporting. And this was added.

Watching that video, those years came rushing back. In it were people I had interviewed and programs I had written about—and a photo of Dr. Pellegrino.

I related in pieces back then Dr. Pellegrino’s story—how he was the son of Italian immigrants and faced problems getting into a medical school because of being an Italian-American. He spoke of a letter he received from one Ivy League medical school saying he would be “happier” with his “own kind.” His college advisor, he said, suggested he change his last name. He refused. 

But his father, in the wholesale grocery business, serviced a restaurant near NYU at which the dean of NYU Medical School had lunch regularly. Its owner introduced him to the dean, young Pellegrino applied to the school, was accepted and graduated in 1944. 

Dr. Pellegrino described to me his dream of integrating medical sciences with the humanities and social sciences. And the hospital he planned, he said, would be nurturing and patient-centered. He maintained that medicine is a “moral enterprise” with a doctor having a “covenant” with his or her patients. He was dissatisfied with the direction medicine was taking, with health care being turned into, he said, a commodity, a business. Stony Brook, he said, would be different. It has been.

Dr. Pellegrino went on to become president of the Catholic University of America, He taught up to the week of his death at 92 in 2013. He attended mass daily. He authored or co-authored 23 books and is considered a founder of the field of bioethics.

The 15 minutes up, I left Stony Brook, vaccinated and smiling.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.