On December 11, 2020, the U.S. government authorized the emergency use of the first COVID-19 vaccine. Three days later, Margaret Klassens, a 96-year-old World War II Veteran in Massachusetts, became the first VA patient in the country to get the shot. The moment marked both a culmination and a turning point in the fight against COVID 19.
VA began preparing for this day in August 2020 when it assembled a COVID-19 Vaccine Integrated Project Team to plan for the vaccine’s distribution. In the months that followed, the agency coordinated the vaccinations of Veterans and staff, launched a campaign to combat vaccine hesitancy, and treated the waves of patients brought into VA medical facilities infected with the virus or its variants. VA also answered the government’s call to assist with the vaccination of the wider U.S. population under its “Fourth Mission.”
VA is responsible for performing three basic missions: delivering benefits, providing health care, and offering burial services to Veterans. In 1982, however, Congress added a fourth mission when it passed the Health Resources Sharing and Emergency Operation Act. Under the terms of this law, VA can furnish medical and hospital care to the public during times of natural disaster or national emergency. President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, and, in doing so, activated VA’s fourth mission. VA responded by supplying more than a million pieces of personal protective equipment to essential workers, admitting hundreds of seriously ill patients who were not Veterans to VA hospitals, and dispatching medical personnel to augment the staffs of state Veteran homes, community nursing homes, and other state and local facilities. Once vaccines became available, VA joined the nationwide mass vaccination campaign and delivered vaccines to people in communities across the nation and to employees at other Federal agencies. All-told, as of April 29, 2022, VA vaccinated over four million Veterans and nearly one hundred thousand non-Veterans.
In an appearance at the Disabled American Veterans national conference in 2021, VA Secretary Denis McDonough emphasized the agency’s commitment to its fourth mission. “We’re very proud of our Fourth Mission work. That has included vaccinating our federal partners, vaccinating additional health care providers, supplementing health care providers at facilities that have taken a particularly bad turn as it relates to COVID-19,” he stated. “All those things are things that we have done and will continue to do. We stand ready to help all of our partners, state, local and federal, to make sure that we get through this.”
The COVID-19 vaccine vial pictured at the top of this entry is from the box of Moderna vaccines used to give shots to Veterans at the VA Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio. Each vial contained ten doses of the vaccine. These items are part of the VA History Office’s COVID-19 collection housed on the Dayton campus. The collection includes other artifacts, ephemera, documents, and oral history interviews that were acquired during the pandemic from offices and individuals across VA. To view more artifacts from the collection, visit VA History’s COVID-19 virtual exhibit.
By Katie Rories
Historian, Veterans Health Administration
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History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 86: The Roll of Honor
“The following pages are devoted to the memory of those heroes who have given up their lives upon the altar of their country, in defense of the American Union.”
So opened the preface to the first volume of the Roll of Honor, a compendium of over 300,000 Federal soldiers who died during the Civil War and were interred in national and other cemeteries. The genesis of this 27-volume collection published between 1865 and 1871 can be traced to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs and the department he oversaw for a remarkable 21 years from 1861 to 1882.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 85: Congressman Claypool’s “$1 Per Day Pension” Ribbon
Founded in 1866 as fraternal organization for Union Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) embraced a new mission in the 1880s: political activism. The GAR formed a pension committee in 1881 for the express purpose of lobbying Congress for more generous pension benefits.
An artifact from the political wrangling over pensions is now part of the permanent collection of the National VA History Center in Dayton, Ohio. The item is a small pension ribbon displaying the message: “I endorse the $1 per day pension as recommended by the Departments of Ohio and Indiana G.A.R.” The button attached to the ribbon features two American flags and the phrase “saved by the boys of ’61-65.” The back of the ribbon bears the signature of Horatio C. Claypool, a Democratic judge who ran for the seat in Ohio’s eleventh Congressional district in the 1910 mid-term elections.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 84: Gettysburg Address Tablet
President Abraham Lincoln is one of the most revered figures in American history. Rankings of U.S. presidents routinely place him at or near the top of the list. Lincoln is also held in high esteem at VA. His stirring call during his second inaugural address in 1865 to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan” embodies the nation’s promise to all who wear the uniform, a promise VA and its predecessor administrations have kept ever since the Civil War.
Ever since Lincoln first uttered those memorable words in November 1863, the Gettysburg Address has been linked to our national cemeteries. In 1908, Congress approved a plan to produce a standard Gettysburg Address tablet to be installed in all national cemeteries in time for the centennial of President Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1909.
