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Tampa Bay man who volunteered for vaccine trial offers perspective on what's to come

If you want to know what to expect from a COVID-19 vaccine, just ask Dan Ford.

CITRUS COUNTY, Fla. — People in Tampa Bay could be rolling up their sleeves in just days from now as the first batch of COVID vaccine reaches our area.

But a Citrus County man will have already beaten all of them to the punch.

If you want to know what to expect from a COVID-19 vaccine, just ask Dan Ford.

“Vaccinations are good. I trust science,” said Ford. “Granted it’s new, but, it’s the one thing that gets us out of his hole.”

Earlier this year, Ford, who lives in Citrus County, volunteered for the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial out of Orlando.

“It’s not many times in your life that you’re able to help millions of people and touch them, and whether you take the trial or not, whether you get the vaccine or not, but to be able to make that impact in our lives is, that means a lot to me,” he said.

Ford had lots of motivation to volunteer.

Not only does he feel it was the right thing to do, but his grandmother was a nurse during the 1918 flu. 

As a divorced dad, Ford hasn’t seen his children, who live with their mother in Maine, in close to a year.

“My kids were saying, 'no don’t do it,'” Ford laughed. “But, I said, 'this is something I’ve got to do if it helps me get to seeing my kids a little earlier than later.'”

Ford still doesn’t know if he’s getting the real thing or a placebo.

The first shot, he says, left him with a headache and an upset stomach.

“Twenty-eight days later I got the second shot. No upset stomach, and, no headache,” he said, “But the next day I felt really tired,”

Ford says he agrees with the decision to prioritize the vaccine’s distribution starting with medical personnel and the elderly.

“They get vaccinated first,” he said.“Take care of our frontline workers and, yeah, that makes sense to me.”

Ford says he’ll head back to Orlando next month and will likely find out then whether he was given a placebo.

If it wasn’t the actual vaccine, he says they‘ve told him he’s eligible to receive the shot if and when it becomes available.

Ford says although his trial was for the Oxford AstraZeneca study, he’d recommend any of the vaccines that show promise.

But it’s not his place, he says, to tell other people what to do.

“I think the encouragement needs to come from within themselves. That they are brave enough to fight this thing. It’s a war,” said Ford. “And it’s won by everybody coming together to fight this thing. So, we have to do it for each other. That’s what really this is about.”

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