It’s a good thing retired nurse Judy Schneider kept her hospital scrubs.
Less than two years after she said farewell to her job at a North Carolina hospital, she is back in them -- and on the front lines of the pandemic -- giving people shots of the Covid-19 vaccine.
“I didn’t think anything would make me want to come back,” Schneider, who retired in 2019 after 29 years of working as a nurse at UNC REX Healthcare in Raleigh, North Carolina, told NBC News. “But then Covid happened, the vaccine rollout happened, and I realized I could help. After months of being quarantined, it’s exciting to be able to help.”
Schneider, 65, said she had planned to travel the world. But for now, she said, the world can wait.
“This is the best nursing job I’ve ever had,” she said while on a break from her post at Rex’s vaccine center, where she works some 15 hours a week. “The people coming in for the vaccines are hospital workers and they are so happy, so thrilled, to be getting it. That makes it fun.”
Across the United States, there are many more former nurses like Schneider who have put their retirement plans on hold and answered the call of service.
“It’s a historic moment,” Schneider said. “It’s public service. It’s a skill I can share.”
In a bid to speed up the delivery of Covid-19 vaccines by making sure there are enough qualified people available to administer the shots, the Department of Health and Human Services has amended the rules so that any physician or registered nurse can do so in any state or U.S. territory.
That includes health care providers whose licenses or certifications have expired within the past five years, as long as they were in good standing “prior to the date it went inactive,” according to the HHS.
“To respond to the nationwide public health emergency caused by Covid-19, the Biden administration is broadening use of the PREP Act to expand the vaccination workforce quickly with additional qualified health care professionals,” acting HHS Secretary Norris Cochran said. “As vaccine supply is made more widely available over the coming months, having additional vaccinators at the ready will help providers and state health departments meet the demand for vaccine and protect their communities more quickly.”
In Florida, where the vaccine rollout has been chaotic at times, Broward County has started enlisting retired nurses, doctors and other health care workers to help dole out doses.
“With the vaccine, we’re going into probably our biggest endeavor so far,” said Dr. Warren Sturman of the county's Medical Reserve Corps told the NBC affiliate in Miami. “Mass vaccinations for a pandemic is something that has always been on our mission statement, something we have always thought about. This is right in line with what we were planning for years, hoping to never have happened, but planning for it."
In Maryland, the TidalHealth Peninsula Regional hospital in the city of Salisbury sent out word to retired nurses that they needed help and within days "six nurses who had worked a combined 241 years immediately stepped forward to volunteer their time, administering vaccinations in five-hour shifts multiple days a week," Maryland Matters reported.
On Long Island, dozens of retired New York nurses have answered the call to help, Newsday reported.
"We’re suddenly doing something we weren’t doing previously," Dr. Aaron Glatt, chairman of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital, told the newspaper. "In this era, it’s not like you have a ton of staff available to do all the work that needs to be done. We want to make sure we can do all the vaccinating we have to, and at the same time not take away from patient care."