Vaccines don't save lives, Vaccinations Dio.

Shortly after that happened, I called my book club and said, We're planning to distribute vaccines.

Can you help?

And they all said Yes.

My book club is a group of very accomplished, very capable women who have all been living through this pandemic with us side by side.

They are business owners, their teachers, their pharmacists.

They are health care professionals.

They are people who, when given the opportunity to make an impact like this, would not hesitate to to take that opportunity.

We sort of sat down and said, OK, who's good at what?

Of course I'm a physician.

My husband's a physician.

We have pharmacists.

We have a lot of people who can inject vaccine, but we also have someone who works with computers.

And she helped to develop the computer system in the New Mexico Department of Health by working with the developers.

We had people who were really good at making flyers and contact acting people who are members of our village council who could help to registered those more vulnerable populations.

We have a woman who is an attorney who has spent hours on the telephone walking elderly people through the vaccination registration process.

People who don't have computers, people who don't speak English.

We have Spanish speakers who could help with that as well.

For instance, my daughter wrote drew flowers on the sidewalk in front of our building to help maintain social distance.

Everyone picked up something they felt they could comfortably do and ran with it.

Ruidoso is in south central New Mexico.

We have a population of about 9000 people in Ruidoso proper.

By this last weekend, I believe that we had completed approximately 1700 vaccination Siri's so 3400 injections.

We also have another six or 700 that we're doing not this weekend, but the next.

So when it's all said and done, we will have completely vaccinated about a third of our town.

So I'll try not to cry again.

Talking about this but way have been mired in this for a year with no clear path toe exit.

When this opportunity came about, this was something that we all felt like we could put our energy somewhere that would help to fix this something far more effective than glaring at people who didn't have masks on and glaring at Facebook posts of people who were throwing parties in spite of being asked not to gather in groups of more than four or six, or however many it waas and and seeing that people really were not able or willing to take the precautions that we have been asked to, this was something that was active.

It's something that has a clear efficacy and something that we can do.