‘One of best Christmas presents ever’: Kansas City hospital gets first COVID vaccines
Truman Medical Centers/University Health received its first shipment of COVID-19 vaccine Monday morning, and the first employee was scheduled to get a dose later in the day, hospital officials said.
Staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were on hand to make sure the shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was received and handled properly. It arrived packed in dry ice — Pfizer’s version of the vaccine must be kept at minus 94 degrees — and then was placed in specialized cold-storage refrigerators by a hospital employee wearing protective gloves.
“When they opened up the box I was thinking this is one of the best Christmas presents ever,” Joel Hennenfent, the hospital system’s chief pharmacy officer, said in a video the hospital released showing the vaccine’s arrival.
Citing security reasons, officials did not disclose what time the shipment arrived or how many doses were delivered.
The hospital system has 4,500 employees. The first doses are to be given to staff members who work directly with COVID-19 patients.
“If you look at the effort to bring this vaccine to reality, this is kind of one of those D-Day, moonshot kind of events that we’ll look back in history and be very proud of not only Truman’s role in the pandemic but also the role of the country as a whole and the scientists that made this happen,” said Charlie Shields, the hospital’s president and CEO.
Truman’s shipment was among the first to arrive in Missouri on Monday, “an exciting day” for the state, Gov. Mike Parson said in a statement.
“It is truly remarkable how far we’ve come since the start of this pandemic, and we are very encouraged to now have a verifiably safe and effective vaccine.”
The governor’s office said shipments would continue this week to 21 initial vaccination sites, which include hospitals and other health care facilities.
Nurses and doctors in Wichita were among the first to be vaccinated in Kansas on Monday. The first were workers providing direct care to COVID patients in the Ascension Via Christi hospital system, The Wichita Eagle reported.
Officials at Saint Luke’s Health System said they expect their first shipment in the next few days and will start scheduling vaccinations of front-line workers then.
The University of Kansas Health System expected its first shipment either later Monday or on Tuesday, a hospital spokesperson said. The hospital is identifying employees who will receive it first and when.
A spokeswoman for AdventHealth said Monday that the hospital system was waiting for information from Kansas health officials on when it would receive the vaccine.
Dr. Mark Steele, Truman’s executive chief clinical office, told The Star the hospital expects to receive more shipments “probably on a weekly basis.”
Like Pfizer, the Moderna vaccine is expected to receive emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “and some of the Moderna vaccine could be flowing as early as next week as well,” said Steele.
Steele said that though the arrival of the vaccine offers “light at the end of the tunnel, the tunnel is long.”
“It’s going to take us several months to be able to get a significant amount of the U.S. population immunized to achieve herd immunity.
“In the interim, although this is really good news, for the next couple, three months, we still have to pay attention and double down on those infection control measures that we’ve been harping about, the social distancing, the mask wearing, no gatherings.
“So just because we have a vaccine now doesn’t mean everybody can go back to their normal lives quite yet.”
In both Kansas and Missouri, health care workers and nursing home residents are at the front of the line in distribution plans submitted to the CDC. Long-term care facilities are waiting to hear when they will receive the vaccine.
Missouri will use 70,000 doses of Moderna vaccine later in December to start vaccinating its long-term care residents, Missouri’s top health official, Randall Williams, told reporters last week.
“So in one action we will be able to vaccinate almost two-thirds if not more of our long-term care facility population starting Dec. 28 and do it very quickly,” the director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services told reporters on a conference call.
Minimizing the morbidity and mortality of that high-risk group “will be tremendous for our hospitals since the average stay for somebody in the ICU can be 10 days to three weeks,” Williams said.
Officials in both Kansas and Missouri have said they expect the vaccine to become available to the general public in spring or summer.
Includes reporting by The Star’s Jonathan Shorman.
This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 11:21 AM.
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