Fifteen UPMC employees received covid-19 vaccines Tuesday, 10 of whom became the first employees to receive a second dose and complete the full course of the vaccine.

“I feel like it’s the first step in ending this,” said Alli Okonak, a certified registered nurse practitioner who has been working at UPMC’s South Side testing site, collecting specimens. “I feel so thankful to be able to have received this and start the wheel in motion for this whole pandemic to end.”

She said her vaccination isn’t just for her — it’s for her two young daughters, her parents who are in their 70s, her co-workers on the front lines and her patients.

“Just — for society,” she said. “I feel like whoever can get the vaccine really needs to do it for the good of the whole.”

It was a sentiment shared by Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, a pediatric and emergency medicine physician and assistant director of Pittsburgh’s EMS, and Manny Philavong, an environmental services supervisor at UPMC Passavant. Each had their own feelings about completing the full course, but all said they got the vaccine not just for themselves.

“It’s really a ‘love thy neighbor as you love thyself’ approach to this virus,” Owusu-Ansah said.

She said it’s one of the first pandemics that highlights how one’s behavior can affect others in a life or death manner.

“It’s not even just, ‘I might give you the common cold,’ it’s ‘my practices might potentially lead to your demise,’ ” she said.

For Philavong, too, it’s for those around him: He works each day cleaning covid-19 rooms, and he lives with his parents, who are in their 80s and have health issues. His pregnant niece and her two children live there, too.

“It’s for them also,” he said. “I come home, get changed in the basement before I come upstairs, and when I talk to them, it’s from a little bit of a distance.”

The side effects from the first dose, they said, were mild.

For Owusu-Ansah, they included soreness in her left arm that she compared to the soreness that comes with a tetanus shot, followed by some muscle soreness the next day that she treated with ibuprofen. All resolved within three days, she said.

“It didn’t interfere with my job or taking care of patients,” she said.

Philavong, too, said his arm was sore, though it lasted only a few hours. Okonak said her arm was more sore than it would be after a typical flu shot. She said she had a slight headache the next day but she was fine by the third day.

Owusu-Ansah stressed that the science says the vaccine is safe and effective, and they encouraged those who can receive the vaccine to do so when their time comes.

“Viruses are as old as dirt,” Owusu-Ansah said. “The scientists who love to know more about these viruses have been studying these viruses for decades, so the thought process that this is all new — there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Coronaviruses are not new, she said, nor is vaccine work on them.

“This is what happens when corporate America, philanthropy and government come together to back and fund science,” she said of the speed at which vaccines were developed. “When you’re able to get the funds that you need, you’re able to get global brainpower.”

Compared to the havoc wreaked by the virus, she said, the vaccine was not a question.

“When I think about covid-19, when I think about patients lying on their bellies, on ventilators, fighting for their lives, dying on their own isolated in ICU rooms because no one else can come in, when I see kids that are having trouble breathing that otherwise shouldn’t have, when I have friends and loved ones who have lost people of all ages or have felt that this has been one of the worst, miserable diseases they’ve ever experienced — then I’d rather have the vaccine,” she said. “I don’t want to do the dance with covid.”

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