First doses of coronavirus vaccines land at Seattle’s UW Medical Center
It arrived “unceremoniously,” this cardboard box filled with new hope.
FedEx dropped off 3,900 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine — some of the first delivered in the state — “a little earlier than anticipated” at 7:20 a.m., said Steve Fijalka, UW Medicine’s chief pharmacy officer.
They’ve been preparing for this moment for months, but it didn’t feel real until the box was in his hands.
“Special,” he said. “Now, comes the fun part: getting it into the arms of staff.”
The vaccine delivery, among the first in Washington state, is the local launch of a historic national effort to vaccinate as many of the country’s 330 million people as are willing to bare their arms. It could represent the turning point against the virus that has killed nearly 3,000 Washingtonians, hobbled the state’s economy and disrupted nearly every aspect of society.
UW Medicine plans to “soft launch” vaccination clinics Tuesday, Fijalka said. Staffers in the highest risk were encouraged to sign up for vaccination Thursday.
“Our plan is to have all of those doses out by Saturday,” Fijalka said, adding that he expected another shipment next week.
But first, deep in the bowels of UW Medicine’s Montlake campus, Fijalka and colleagues had to perform what will soon become ritual — a choreographed unboxing.
The box arrived with four trays the size of a pizza box. Each tray had 195 vials, containing five doses each. UW Medicine received one tray for each of its campuses, which needed to be unpacked and delivered.
Fijalka slipped on cryo-gloves to protect against subzero temperatures inside the box, slid a box cutter through the tape, pulled out a package of dry ice as fog wafted out of the box.
His colleague, Christine Meyer, grabbed a tray, and stuffed it into an ultra-cold freezer, equipped with temperature sensors to ensure vials of vaccine do not exceed minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit.
Another colleague shoveled an infusion of dry ice into the box to keep the other trays cold for transportation. Fijalka sealed the box back up, and wheeled it down the hallway. A few people wearing scrubs did a double-take at the sight.
“Good morning,” Fijalka said, cheerily, to one group of passersby. “Happy vaccine day.”
Then, he loaded the material into a black SUV, and started off to UW Medicine — Northwest, Harborview Medical Center and Valley Medical to deliver his holiday gifts.
The Federal Drug Administration gave the vaccine emergency approval on Friday, triggering shipments to hospitals across the country.
Gov. Jay Inslee on Sunday announced that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had won the approval of an independent group of scientists in Western states, paving the way for inoculations.
Washington’s first 62,400 doses have been directed to 40 facilities in 29 counties, including hospitals, one pharmacy, two tribal nations and an urban Indian health facility, according to Michele Roberts, the state Department of Health’s acting assistant secretary. Most doses will go to health care workers.
Between Pfizer’s vaccine, and the Moderna vaccine that awaits emergency approval, state officials expect more than 400,000 doses from the federal government by the end of 2020, which will go to hospitals for health care workers and to residents in long-term care facilities.
State officials last week further refined which health care workers should get the first doses, asking hospitals to use “clinical judgment” to direct the vaccine to those with the highest risk, including people who treat patients face to face, testing-site staffers and first responders with the most risk of exposure.