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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – The Bay Area could be weeks away from receiving the first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, with two hospitals saying they are ready to get it.
The UCSF and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General will be among the seven California hospitals to obtain an advance allocation of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. But first, the Food and Drug Administration must grant an emergency use authorization.
The next meeting will be on December 10th.
“Until the FDA officially acts, no one will receive the vaccine from this stock,” UC Berkeley epidemiologist Dr. Art Reingold said.
If emergency use authorization is granted, UCSF said it was ready and could receive the vaccine three to seven days after the authorization was granted.
The vaccine would arrive from Pfizer in Michigan on a truck.
“It’s under a very low freezer so it would be very difficult to put it on an airplane,” said Dr Desi Kotis, director of pharmacy for UCSF Health. The vaccines will arrive packaged in 80 pounds of dry ice pellets and will immediately be placed in ultra-cold freezers.
“We have enough freezing capacity for quite a few doses, in the hundreds of thousands of doses,” Kotis said.
Each two-milliliter vial contains five doses of dry vaccine. For injection, it must be thawed, reconstituted and administered within 48 hours of thawing.
“It comes in these almost pizza boxes, nine by nine by two inch boxes and they’re stacked in five. So in one of those boxes there are almost 1,000 doses, ”Kotis told KPIX 5.
The Pfizer vaccine is a two-dose mRNA vaccine, with a second dose required 21 days after the first injection to fully protect against the coronavirus.
Side effects have been reported including high fever, body aches, fatigue, and headache. In the Pfizer clinical trial of 50,000 people, most people reported experiencing side effects after injecting the second dose.
For this reason, UCSF said it will not vaccinate entire departments against COVID-19 at once.
“If they’re showing symptoms, they might not be able to come to work with a high fever, right? So we want to make sure that we don’t vaccinate everyone who works in the ER at the same time, so we are going to stagger how we vaccinate, ”Kotis said.
Who will receive the first doses at UCSF? “Those who work with COVID patients, those who may be in areas like the emergency room, emergency care centers, various clinics that have patients who may not know they have COVID. So whoever is most at risk, ”continued the doctor. “They are not just doctors and nurses, they are transporters of patients, housekeepers, various members of the technical staff, phlebotomists.”
Other hospitals that have early access to the vaccine include UC Davis Medical Center, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera.
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