One of first four vaccine recipients was Murphy donor

A Livingston physician and frontline health care worker who was one of the first four New Jerseyans to receive the COVID-19 vaccination was a donor to Gov. Phil Murphy’s gubernatorial campaign.

Justin Sambol, the senior associate dean at Rutgers University Medical School, was one of the first four New Jerseyans to receive the vaccination.

Sambol contributed $2,150 to Murphy for Governor in 2017 and another $500 to the Murphy Inaugural Committee in 2018, according to reports filed with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission.  He also donated $1,000 to Assemblyman Jon Bramnick’s 2019 re-election campaign.

Murphy was in Newark early Tuesday morning to watch the launch of New Jersey’s vaccination effort.

Sambol and Murphy have met at least one additional time, based on a photo the Cardiothoracic surgeon posted on social media more than three years ago.

The four recipients of the first 76,050 doses of the BioNTech vaccine were picked by University Hospital and Rutgers University, a spokesman for the governor told the New Jersey Globe.

A press release from Murphy said that the state will roll out vaccines in phases to “ensure that limited vaccines are distributed in a fair and equitable manner.”

The first to receive the vaccine are acute care hospital workers with the highest risk to exposure of the coronavirus.

The group of vaccines, Phase 1A, will affect about 650,000 New Jerseyans.

“This is a day that we have been waiting nearly a year for, and while we know this isn’t the end, we are witnessing, at the least, a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel,” Murphy said. “Without question, we are still in for several hard months and we are going to face stiff headwinds from this second wave, but now our heroic frontline health care workers can begin to take care of their fellow New Jerseyans with a higher degree of confidence in their own protection.”