The COVID-19 vaccine has arrived in Utah.
Two Utah hospitals — Utah Valley Regional Hospital in Provo and LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City — have received the first doses of the Pfizer Inc. vaccine, and others should arrive in the next day or two, said Dr. Kristin Dascomb, medical director of infection prevention for employee health at Intermountain Healthcare.
Other hospitals should receive the shipments by Tuesday, she said. The first doses will be given to health care workers at the hospitals starting Wednesday, Dascomb said at a Monday news conference.
The vaccine arrives in supercold containers, and takes between 30 minutes and three hours to thaw. The vaccine doses will then be put in a fluid for injection. They must be administered within six hours “to ensure stability,” Dascomb said.
Stenehjem said he and his fellow infectious disease doctors have read the research, and “we all feel this vaccine is safe and effective. … We’ve looked under the hood.” The doctors are so confident in the vaccine, he said, that they will be taking it themselves.
After health care workers and long-term care facility residents are given the vaccine, the second wave of vaccination in Utah will include the elderly, people with underlying health problems and essential workers. Those people should receive their vaccines early next year.
The third wave, which should cover all Utahns, should happen between March and June, Dascomb said. “We will happily announce” when it’s time for everyone to get vaccinated, Dascomb said.
Elsewhere Monday, health care workers in New York, Ohio and Louisiana were among the first people in the United States to receive the new COVID-19 vaccine.
Utah’s first shipments of the vaccine — developed by Pfizer Inc. and the German company BioNTech — are expected to arrive Monday and Tuesday at five Utah hospitals: University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, Intermountain Medical Center in Murray and Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George, in addition to Utah Valley Regional Hospital and LDS Hospital.
Those five hospitals were chosen to get the first Pfizer doses because they have had the heaviest caseloads of COVID-19, and because they are equipped with the supercold refrigeration units needed to hold the vaccine.
Utah is scheduled to receive 23,400 doses in the first shipment this week, the Utah Department of Health has reported. By the end of December, the state should get a total of 154,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which the federal Food and Drug Administration approved on Friday, and a similar vaccine by Moderna Inc. that is awaiting FDA approval.
It’s the biggest vaccination campaign in U.S. history — and arrives as the nation’s death toll from COVID-19 closes in on 300,000. As of Sunday, 1,055 Utahns have died from the virus.
