Palamu has quite a few 'unsung heroes' who have selflessly served the society during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Some arranged the shrouds, some bought timber for the pyre and some not known to the dead just stood when the cremation or burial was on.
In a first of this series profiling such heroes, The Pioneer picks a man from the medicine, Dr John F Kennedy who continues to motivate people for the vaccination when he himself got 'precariously' infected with coronavirus leading to his hospitalisation in Patna.
Kennedy, a name that is bound to create a lot of inquisitiveness, is in fact of this man who is a Brahmin of Bihar and loves speaking Mathili dialect as fluently as he speaks English.
His younger brother is John Robert Kennedy who is a doctor too. Elder Kennedy's wife Neelu Mishra is a senior BJP leader here.
John F Kennedy narrating his experiences of his vaccination campaign that he ran in a running passenger train said, “When I approached passengers in the running passenger train they first thought me to be of ticket checking drive but when I gave them masks there came a sudden relief on their faces."
About his errand of his same vaccination campaign on the border of Chhattisgarh, Kennedy said, “I was not wearing a doctor’s apron. I was in a shirt and jeans. The Chhattisgarh man who was a staff member managing traffic from Jharkhand to Chhattisgarh didn't pay any attention to me."
Kennedy said this Chhattisgarh man thought him to be an ordinary man with no work except asking for not allowing any one from the Chhattisgarh side to Jharkhand's Garhwa district without a mask. He said he had to do a lot of persuasion there.
Kennedy was the civil surgeon in-charge Palamu but he lost his chair of the civil surgeon after his clinical recovery from the critical infestation with Covid infection.
The decision of the state government to displace Kennedy from the chair of the civil surgeon in the wake of his well justified and lawful absence on account of the severe and critical covid infection stirred a hornet's nest making people of all hues to ask if this is the price of the anti-Covid fight or a penalty for vigorous campaign for the vaccination.
Today armed with authority of drawing and disbursing by the state government, Kennedy is functioning as regional deputy director health services Palamu which is just a ceremonial post in comparison to the post of the civil surgeon.
The state health department first notified Dr Anil Kumar Srivastava as civil surgeon in charge and forty days later the state health department notified Dr Anil Kumar as the civil surgeon in-charge Palamu.