Not all NC hospitals will get the COVID vaccine at first. Here’s who is on the list.
Initial shipments of the coronavirus vaccine will go to only a fraction of North Carolina’s hospitals, and they range from small community hospitals to large research institutions, according to a list released Monday by the state Department of Health and Human Services.
The list included only sites that have freezers needed to store the Pfizer vaccine, said Kelly Haight Connor, spokeswoman for NCDHHS. They will be able to receive the vaccine in advance and have it on hand to use when the federal government gives the okay.
In an email, Connor said “several dozen other sites” will also receive vaccine the first week it is available, but they’ll need to wait for it to be shipped from the manufacturer or a distributor.
North Carolina anticipates receiving about 85,000 doses of the vaccine developed by Pfizer after the Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve its use on Thursday. Dr. Mandy Cohen, the state Secretary of Health and Human Services, has said hospitals could begin giving vaccine to employees who work in high-risk settings as soon as next week.
But Cohen says there won’t be enough vaccines for front-line workers at all hospitals to be vaccinated right away. Cohen told CNN over the weekend that only “about 50 to 60” of the more than 100 hospitals in the state would receive the vaccine initially, with more added as supplies become available.
The hospitals that will get early shipments for storage include Duke University Health System, CarolinaEast Medical Center in New Bern, Cape Fear Valley Health System in Fayetteville, Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem and The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority or Atrium Health in Charlotte.
Among the smaller hospitals on the list are Bladen County Hospital, Caldwell Memorial Hospital, Catawba Valley Medical Center, Hoke Hospital and Pardee Memorial Hospital in Hendersonville.
The list also includes the “University of North Carolina Shared Services Agreement,” which appears to refer to a warehouse in Morrisville that the UNC Health system uses to store and distribute supplies to UNC hospitals in the Triangle region, including Rex in Raleigh and UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill.
North Carolina vaccine plan
The state’s COVID-19 vaccination plan says several factors are used to determine how the vaccine will be distributed, including current prevalence of COVID-19 in a particular area and a hospital’s ability to handle the vaccine.
The Pfizer vaccine must be kept in special freezers at ultra-low temperatures before it is ready to use, and not all hospitals have them.
That’s why WakeMed and its hospitals in Wake County were left off the list of places expected to receive the early shipments, said spokeswoman Kristin Kelly. WakeMed did not have the ultra-cold freezers until last week and now expects to receive vaccine during the initial allocation, Kelly said.
“I believe the state will notify us today or tomorrow as to how much vaccine will be included in this initial shipment,” she wrote in an email. “We anticipate that we will receive vaccine during week 1 allocation.”
Duke Health, which has three hospitals in Durham and Raleigh, has not heard from the state how many doses of the vaccine it would receive or when, said Gail Shulby, who has led the vaccination planning effort at Duke.
Shulby said the state asked whether Duke could administer 975 doses within a week. Shulby said that would cover about a fifth of the workers who are most likely to be exposed to coronavirus. She told the state that Duke could certainly handle 975 doses.
“I’d really like to have about 40,000, but I don’t think they’re going to give it to me,” she said.
The 85,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine the state expects to receive initially would be used to inoculate 85,000 people, said Connor, the DHHS spokeswoman.
To work, the vaccine needs to be administered twice, 21 days apart. Connor said the state expects additional vaccines will be shipped weekly, and DHHS will would count on the second dose for the initial 85,000 recipients to arrive closer to day it’s needed.
The FDA also is expected to consider Emergency Use Authorization of the Moderna vaccine, which also has seen promising results in trials.
After frontline health-care workers, including those who clean around COVID-19 patients, and staff in emergency rooms, people who live and work in longterm care facilities would be next on North Carolina’s distribution list, Cohen said in press conferences on the vaccine last week.
Adults with two or more high-risk conditions would follow, likely by early 2021, Cohen said.
This story was originally published December 7, 2020 at 4:13 PM with the headline "Not all NC hospitals will get the COVID vaccine at first. Here’s who is on the list.."
