UC Davis Med Center get first doses of Moderna vaccine
SACRAMENTO » In a dose of good news this holiday week, UC Davis Medical Center received its initial allotment of the Moderna COVID- 19 vaccine this week, part of shipments which are arriving statewide.
In Southern California, St. Joseph Hospital in Orange got a shipment of 3,900 doses of the Moderna- created vaccine Tuesday morning, a Providence Health System spokesman said in an email. Providence owns St. Joseph and three other hospitals in Orange County.
Moderna’s vaccine is one of two the U. S. Food and Drug Administration has given emergency authorization for immediate use.
Also Tuesday, UCI Medical Center received 2,800 doses of the Moderna vaccine, spokesman John Murray said. The center continued to work its way through the Pfizer doses already received and expected to have inoculated more than 4,300 workers by the end of Tuesday.
The vaccine arrivals are good news, but they won’t do anything to lessen the strain on medical providers, which are adding beds to deal with a spike in coronavirus- related hospitalizations that started around mid- November.
Public health officials have urged people to continue taking precautions — wearing face coverings, washing hands and keeping a distance from people outside their household — and to avoid gathering for holiday events to curb spreading the virus. At the UCD Med Center, there were 4,300 doses that arrived. This is the second vaccine UC Davis Health has received in as many weeks.
On Dec. 15, 4,875 doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine arrived.
The medical center has already vaccinated more than 4,000 employees with an initial dose of the Pfizer two- shot regimen and expects to use up its initial allotment within the next day or so.
“When that happens, we expect to begin vaccinating employees with the Moderna vaccine,” said Chad Hatfield, Chief Pharmacy Officer.
UC Davis Health developed priority tiers to ensure the vaccine is distributed equitably among employees who wish to be inoculated. They’re based on the risk of COVID- 19 infection while on the job. The health system expects to inoculate about 400 employees a day, and eventually, as many as 1,000 as other vaccines become available. We expect to be able to start offering the vaccine to the general public in the spring.
Hatfield says we can store 200,000 or more Moderna doses in existing freezers, by moving a few things around. As it
receives more ultra- cold freezers, it should be able to store up to 400,000 Pfizer doses at one time.
Hatfield notes that other vaccine products are in the pipeline as well. “I don’t think these will be the last ones to come to market.”
“There’s very few times
in our history that we’ve been able to mount this type of response, in what’s really a worldwide vaccination,” he noted. “For pharmacy folks, we bring in drugs all the time, we move things around, deal with shortages and from a logistics perspective, this
is what we do. But from a larger perspective, it’s monumental. It’s pretty cool to be a part of history, to be a part of this vaccination.”