Page 5 - Healthcare News Nov_Dec, 2020

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VACCINES CONT’D
With Pfizer gaining emergency-use autho- rization from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to begin distributing its vaccine — and Moderna expected to do the same — the Baker-Polito administra- tion announced allocation and distribution plans for the first round of vaccine ship- ments to Massachusetts, expected to begin around Dec. 15. The state’s first shipment
of 59,475 doses of the Pfizer vaccine was or- dered from the federal government and will be delivered directly to 21 hospitals across eight counties, as well as to the Department of Public Health immunization lab.
Doses will then be redistributed for access to 74 hospitals across all 14 counties for frontline medical workers. Another 40,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine will be allocated to the Federal Pharmacy Program to begin vaccinating staff and residents of skilled- nursing facilities and assisted-living resi- dences in Massachusetts.
In all, Massachusetts is expecting 300,000 doses of vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna to be delivered by the end of December. Both vaccines require two doses administered three to four weeks apart. While all delivery dates and quantities are subject to change due to ongoing federal ap-
“Messaging is critical, and the messengers are critical. Hopefully, we’ll have good results, and more people will be willing to take it.”
proval and allocation, state leaders expect to receive and distribute more than 2 mil- lion doses to priority population groups by the end of March.
“It does make perfect sense,” Artenstein said of the prioritization plans, which reflect judgments on the federal level and
ensure delivery to groups like healthcare workers, first responders, the elderly, and people with co-morbidities before the rest of the public. In the case of seniors, for ex- ample, “it’s not that they’re more likely to get the virus, necessarily, but they’re more likely to die if they get infected. They do worse.”
Meanwhile, he added, healthcare workers have a greater risk of coro-
navirus exposure than most other people.
“We’ve been inundated — inundated — with calls from other groups that they want the vaccine,” he said, placing heavy emphasis on that word. “But the truth is, it isn’t available for the gen- eral population now, and
it may be several months before it is.”
Dr. Andrew Artens- tein says the public should not let down their guard when it comes to masking and social distancing while they wait for the vaccine.
with a reality check on the timeline — and what people need to do in the meantime.
“A vaccine may eventually be the answer, but it’s only going to be part of the solution for the next six to 12 months, assuming we continue to get vaccines that are safe and effective. It’s going to take a while — even if all goes well — before we get enough im- munity in the population to really put an end to this thing.
“In the meantime,” he went on, “we would benefit greatly by continuing to push the classic ways to interrupt transmission: masks, distancing, avoiding gatherings. All those things will continue to help us be- cause, even after we start vaccinating parts of the population, it will take the better part of the year to roll it out to everyone, and we need to continue to interrupt transmission.”
Jessica Collins, executive director of the Public Health Institute of Western Mas- sachusetts, agreed, even though it can be a challenge getting through to people suffer- ing from ‘pandemic fatigue,’ who feel iso- lated and weary of all the changes in their lives over the past year.
“I’m sorry people are tired,” she said. “But the basic messaging isn’t hard — wear a
Please see Vaccines, page 7
JESSICA COLLINS
Artenstein, an infectious- disease expert who founded and directed
the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Pathogens at Brown University for more than a decade before arriving at Baystate, has been one of the public faces locally of the fight against COVID-19, and he was careful to temper optimism about a vaccine