Nurse of the Week Carla Brown is on a Mission to Vaccinate North Baton Rouge

Nurse of the Week, Carla Brown, RN, accompanied by a colleague clutching a clipboard to her chest, is standing outside a house in her North Baton Rouge, LA neighborhood. “You seem kind of impatient when you get to these doors to talk to these people…” a CBS reporter remarks. “Yes,” Brown replies, “Because I feel the urgency… Today I could see you, and tomorrow, you may not be here.”

Carla Brown does not have time for nonsense. These days, in addition to her work as an RN in a hospice, Brown has also donned the mantle of a community nurse. After experiencing her own tragic Covid loss, she’s managing her grief by doubling down on what nurses do best: helping people. Now, when not on duty at the hospice, Carla is on duty in her majority-Black North Baton Rouge area, pounding the pavement (nurses are also expert walkers!) and signing up neighbors for Covid-19 vaccination appointments. And when her elderly or disabled “patients” cannot reach a vaccination site, Brown swings by in her car and drives them there.

Her own loss was the nightmare of every frontline nurse. After Brown unknowingly contracted an asymptomatic case of Sars-CoV-2 at work, she came home and infected her family with the virus. The consequences were devastating. Carla’s husband, “the love of my life, David,” fell ill, as did her 90-year-old father, and 67-year-old brother. All three—husband, father, and brother—had to be hospitalized. Her spouse, David Brown, died in the hospital at age 67.

The grim statistics in the Baton Rouge vaccination efforts against Covid-19—that 64% of the white population has had at least one shot, while just 26% of the city’s Black community have had jabs—gave the bereaved Carla a new purpose: “All I can do now,” she says, “Is save somebody else.”

The vast discrepancy between white Baton Rouge and Black Baton Rouge has less to do with vaccine hesitancy than it does with our old familiar frenemy, structural racism. North Baton Rouge (NBR) has long been underserved by the local healthcare system, and the Covid vaccines have been strangely scarce in the area. Aside from a few ephemeral pop-up vaccination sites that have been hosted by Black churches, vaccines have been available at only four sites in the district.

To attack the vaccine scarcity problem, Carla employed some special artillery. Clad in her hospice uniform, the undaunted RN stepped into a popular neighborhood pharmacy—with a CBS reporter and camera crew in tow—and asked to speak with the owner. She told the proprietor that she could provide the completed registrations, insurance paperwork, and ID confirmations for NBR locals who have been won over by her urgent campaign. “We just need,” she said, “Somebody to supply us with the vaccine.”

The result? Well, it is hard to dismiss nurse Brown even when she is not accompanied by a news team from a major national broadcasting network. In fact, after agreeing to order vaccine ASAP, the pharmacist implied he had little choice: “She’s an angel!” he said of Carla. “An angel in disguise.”

A tough angel, though. As Brown told a local station in Baton Rouge, “You want to go to your grave early, or you want to live? That’s been my sales pitch.” And when walking the streets and knocking on doors doesn’t get results, “Some [neighbors] I just physically took in my car and brought.”