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 There are thousands of emails to sort through and phone calls to
field, supplies to organize, appointments to schedule.
Amin, known as Dr. Mak, set up a vaccination clinic on Super Bowl
Sunday at the local firehouse that drew more than 1,000 people who
kept their appointments for shots despite the snow that day.
"It was just like a party out there," Amin, 36, recalled during an
interview with Reuters in late February. "It was something you could
have never imagined in your life, to see four strangers carrying
somebody on a wheelchair to get them through the mud and into the
building."
Thanks to deep ties with their communities and the trust they have
been able to establish over the years, some local pharmacists are
instrumental in reaching people who might be reluctant to get
vaccinated or may not know about vaccination efforts, said Jennifer
Kates, the director of global health and HIV policy at Kaiser Family
Foundation.
"Those local pharmacies are a really important trusted voice," Kates
said.
The vaccine rollout, which the administration of former President
Donald Trump left to the states to carry out without a federal
blueprint or sufficient funding, has proven to be choppy. Under
President Joe Biden supply has increased but some distribution and
access hurdles persist.
Montgomery County, where Schwenksville is located, has one of the
highest per capita vaccination rates in the state, according to the
state health department website. Pennsylvania ranks 28 out of 50
states with 18% of residents getting at least one shot, according to
the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. (https://tmsnrt.rs/2WTOZDR)
SURPRISE SHOT
On a gray Saturday morning in late February, Amin slipped into a
Superman costume, the remnant of Halloweens past that he now
sometimes wears for vaccinations, and drove through the frozen
suburbs to deliver two COVID-19 vaccines to home-bound patients.
"What a surprise!" 74-year-old on Gail Bertsch said after Amin and a
few volunteers, whom she had not been expecting, knocked on her
door. She and her husband James, who suffers from dementia, both got
injections.
"I can't believe we can actually have this done," she said.
Amin has also vaccinated people by appointment at his pharmacy,
including holding a special clinic for pregnant women and another
one for children with underlying health conditions.
Among them was the pharmacist's nephew, who suffers from
neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes tumors to form in the
brain, nerves, and other parts of the body.
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 Some 3,000 people have received
first shots of both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech
through Skippack Pharmacy since early February,
Amin said. Among some 1,000 residents who
received second doses over the weekend were
Chester and Martha Pish, 97 and 98 years old
respectively, who have been married 78 years.
The effort has been all-consuming for Amin, and
riddled with hurdles, including organizing
vaccine stocks – which sometimes arrive at a few
hours' notice, a side effect of the supply chain
hiccups that are among the problems that have
plagued the rollout. The young
pharmacist reunites with his pregnant wife only on weekends as a
health precaution and spends the week at his parents' home in
Lansdale. The couple will welcome their first child in May.
"I want to be there when my child is born, and I want to make sure
that all my people are vaccinated by then," he told Reuters. "If I
can, that would be my dream."
COME TOGETHER
Pandemic hardship and now the drive to get shots into people’s arms
have united his Montgomery County community behind the young
pharmacist.
On a recent Friday, five volunteers converged in the back of the
store. They filled spreadsheets with patients' contact information
and checked the inventory of vaccination supplies.
Amin has just one other full-time employee, Jacquelyn Ziegler, and
two pharmacy student interns, Erica Mabry and Isabelle Lawler. But
he can count on dozens of volunteers, including family members, to
answer the phone and help less tech-savvy patients navigate the
online system to book a COVID-19 vaccine appointment.
"It's just incredible how everyone has kind of like filtered into
this one space," said event planner Courtney Marengo, one of Amin's
volunteers.
Amin said he did not set out to own a pharmacy. But he moved to fill
a void left when Skippack, a 50-year-old local institution, was
bought out by national giant CVS in 2018. The chain acquired
Skippack Pharmacy's assets but left it shuttered. Amin bought the
pharmacy from CVS before the pandemic in hopes of keeping the
resource in the community.
"I feel like sometimes things fall into your lap at certain points
in your life," he said. "You might not have planned for it to
happen, but things happen for the right reason."
(Reporting by Maria Caspani and Hannah Beier in Schwenksville,
Pennsylvania; writing by Maria Caspani; editing by Donna Bryson and
Lisa Shumaker)
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