Boston Medical Center accepted 1,950 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine Monday morning, marking the arrival of the life-saving product amid a spike in coronavirus infections and deaths in Massachusetts.
Other Boston-area hospitals and health organizations contacted by the Globe said they expect to receive their initial doses of vaccines starting Tuesday, although they stressed that could change depending on changes in shipment protocols.
The BMC will offer the vaccine first to employees who have frequent contact with COVID-19 patients. That includes doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists, as well as workers in dietary, transport, and environmental services — anyone who comes into COVID-19 patient rooms.
About 3,000 of the hospital’s 12,000 employees fall into that category, and the hospital expects to get additional doses next week to reach all 3,000, said David Twitchell, chief pharmacy officer of the Boston Medical Center Health System.
“We plan to be able to vaccinate as many as 1,000 by Saturday and then another 300 or so Monday and Tuesday,” Twitchell said.
As for who goes first among those 3,000, the hospital will run a randomization program so they get chosen purely by chance. The first 300 people will start to get emails soon. The very first person to get the vaccine will be someone in that randomly chosen group who happens to be available during the first time slot on Wednesday morning, Twitchell said.
“This is just about the operational waves of getting this done,” Twitchell said. “If you’re day one or day five, there’s no clinical difference. It’s not because anyone is more important or less. It’s just about spacing it out operationally.”
Participants will be scheduled to ensure social distancing and to leave time for the 15-minute observation period after the shot, he said.
An additional 3,000 employees have less-frequent contact with COVID-19 patients, and they are next on the priority list. Twitchell said the hospital hopes to vaccinate all 6,000 people who have contact with COVID-19 patients within the next two months, and eventually reach all its employees. Then it will start offering the vaccine to the public.
Each employee will have to come back in three weeks for their second dose. But even fully vaccinated staff will continue to wear full protective equipment, because it’s not yet known whether vaccinated people can still transmit the virus. It’s possible that a vaccinated person could become infected, have no symptoms, and spread the virus so someone else.
The Pfizer vaccine has to be kept at a temperature of negative 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Boston Medical Center already had one super-cold freezer, which is used for its pharmacy research program — most recently for the clinical trial of the Pfizer vaccine. It also recently bought a second freezer.
The vaccines were delivered by FedEx Monday morning, all contained in a single white box that weighs about 40 pounds, Twitchell said. The box contains a device that records whether the required super-cold temperature was maintained throughout transit. The hospital will confirm that that happened before scheduling shots, Twitchell said.
Twitchell said he’s feeling “excited and very optimistic” now that the first batch of vaccine is in hand. “There’s this feeling of having a new tool and beginning a different phase of how are addressing this,” he said. “Once you take the first step, you’re on your way to a different place.”
BMC received the initial shipment shortly before 9 a.m. Monday.
The national and international efforts to vaccinate hundreds of millions is a complex task some have likened to D-Day during World War II.
“This is going to be the largest vaccination effort in history,” Twitchell said over the weekend. “I think the D-Day analogy is right: We’re going to go from defense to offense here.”
The vaccine arrives as the confirmed coronavirus cases in the state rose by 4,677 Sunday, bringing the state’s total to 279,574. The death toll from confirmed cases increased by 41 to 11,098, the Department of Public Health reported.
A significant portion of the state’s initial allocation of 59,475 vaccine doses, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, is being shipped directly to several area hospitals and health care systems.
The vaccine arrives as the confirmed coronavirus cases in the state rose by 4,677 Sunday, bringing the state’s total to 279,574. The death toll from confirmed cases increased by 41 to 11,098, the Department of Public Health reported.
Tufts Medical Center, which originally expected a shipment Monday, now says officials have been told to expect it to arrive Tuesday.
Mass General Brigham also is anticipating the arrival of the first shipment of vaccine on Tuesday. “We are receiving shipments of vaccine as a system and will distribute among our 12 hospitals,” said spokesman Rich Copp.
Another major health care organization in eastern Massachusetts, Beth Israel Lahey Health, said they are still waiting for their share of the vaccine to arrive “in the next day or two” with the expectation that staffers will start getting their shots.
“We are prioritizing administration of the vaccine to patient-facing clinicians and staff who are at the greatest risk of exposure to patients with COVID-19 based on their work location and the patients they support,’' said Dr. Richard Nesto chief medical officer for Beth Israel Lahey Health.
In Central Massachusetts, the UMass Medical Center in Worcester also said its 1,950 doses are due Tuesday morning. Frontline health care workers will get the first shot of the two-dose vaccine starting Thursday until the first shipment is exhausted. “We are not going to store any vaccines,” he said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Globe Correspondent John Hilliard and Travis Andersen of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
John R. Ellement can be reached at john.ellement@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @JREbosglobe. Felice J. Freyer can be reached at felice.freyer@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @felicejfreyer.
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