Vaccine is onway to hospitals
Memorial Regional and Jackson Memorial among 5 in Florida to store shot while it awaits approval
The new COVID-19 vaccine— not yet approved for use — is on its way to two South Florida hospitals.
Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood and Jacks on Memorial Hospital in Miami will be among the first five hospitals across Florida to store the vaccine while they wait for final approval to use it, officials said Wednesday. The vaccine stored by hospitals will be whichever the government approves first, possibly Pfizer’s.
Theother three hospitals are Advent Health Orlando, formerly Florida Hospital Orlando, as well as Tampa General Hospital and UF Health Jacksonville. The first vaccines would start arriving in mid-December and another shipment is expected in January.
The plan to start supplying hospitals with the vaccine comes as a ray of hope as Florida’s COVID19 infections continue to rise. The number of new cases has followed monthlong trends of increases across the state, based on health department data. Infectious disease specialists warn that a rate over 5% shows the virus is not under control, andall three major South Florida counties have exceeded that level this month.
There will be a phased approach to vaccination by creating priority groups.
“During the first phase, the vaccine will be available for front-line health care workers in hospitals, long-term-care staff and residents, and first responders,” said Lidia Amoretti, spokeswoman
for Jackson Health System.
The Florida hospitals were chosen by the state because they’re in heavily populated areas and have the ability to maintain ultracold storage. Memorial Regional Hospital has “purchased freezers capable of storing the vaccine at the appropriate temperature ,” said hospital spokeswoman Kerting Baldwin.
“We put in an order three weeks ago so we would have more capacity. We had a freezer butwe ordered another larger one,” said Aurelio Fernandez, the president and chief executive officer of Memorial Healthcare System .“We saw that Pfizer was getting close sowe ordered a larger freezer.”
The U.S. will get 40 million vials and the governor told him Florida will get about 2 million of those, Fernandez said. The Pfizer vaccine requires two shots so that means about one million people will benefit from the Pfizer vaccine.
Jared Moskowitz, the director of Florida’ s Division of Emergency Management,
told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Wednesday that the deployment of vaccines to hospitals is part of a plan that kicked off earlier this year.
Months ago, the emergency management division started “preparing for the vaccine and pro cured millions of syringes and gauze so that we would have the supplies ready to help deploy the vaccine,” Moskowitz said. “We’re ready to deploy the vaccine. But while we wait to get it, people need to continue to wear masks and do mitigation measures.”
Pfizer recently announced that an early analysis showed its vaccine candidate was more than 90% effective. The vaccine, developed with the German company BioNTech, has to be stored at around minus 70 degrees Celsius until shortly before it is injected. Pfizer said Wednesday that new test results show its coronavirus vaccine is 95% effective, is safe and also protects older people who are most at risk of dying.
Another company, Moderna, said Monday its COVID-19 vaccine appears to be 94.5% effective.
The news from both companies puts them ontrack to seek permission within weeks for
emergency use in the U.S.
One of the main goals of the federal government’ s Operation Warp Speed was to work with drug companies tomanufacture the vaccines even before clinical trials were completed, so that millions of doses would be ready to go if a vaccine was successful.
Lubby Navarro, director of legislative affairs for Memorial Healthcare System, whose flagship hospital is Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, told Broward mayors at a closed-door meeting Monday that they are seeing a “third wave of increases” of new coronavirus patients.
Memorial is one of the five hospital locations in Florida designated to have the vaccine, and “we should be receiving it in a couple of weeks,” she told the mayors, according to records obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will manage the distribution, Baldwin said.
There is no word yet if the vaccines willbe approved for children, or only adults.