After receiving 2,000 doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Monday, SF General became the first hospital in town to begin administering the vaccine Tuesday morning, involving an intensive care physician treating the most critically ill COVID patients. , was the first to get it. a dose.
Dr. Antonio Gomez received the vaccine just after 9 a.m. on Tuesday, as KPIX and the Examiner report. Gomez is Medical Director of Critical Care Services at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and has served on UCSF faculty in the Pulmonary Department. He said in a faculty interview that he ended up in the pulmonary and intensive care unit “ because I really enjoyed the weird, very extreme physiology that affects multiple organ systems in the ICU – much of which often revolves around the seemingly simple act of air that from the lungs. “
Dr. Antonio Gomez was the first person to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in San Francisco. He is the medical director of Critical Care Services at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where he has treated the most critically ill COVID-19 patients. https://t.co/W3HChnMqR8 pic.twitter.com/nRvwPA6dvi
– KTVU (@KTVU) December 15, 2020
A nurse in SF General’s intensive care unit, Phung Nguyen, was the second person in San Francisco to receive a vaccination dose.
“This is a historic day for our city and, we hope, the beginning of a turning point in our response to COVID-19,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement. “This has been a very difficult year, and this is good news for our city and for the fight against COVID. It gives us much-needed hope in an otherwise challenging and uncertain time.”
Also, UCSF, Stanford Medical Center and John Muir Health in Walnut Creek received their first doses of the vaccine on Monday, and vaccinations are expected to begin the next day or so in all three hospitals.
The initial Pfizer vaccine assignment in San Francisco is expected to include 12,675 doses, which will be administered to health professionals, with workers prioritized based on the number of patients they care for. The first dose of the vaccine is expected to confer some degree of immunity to COVID-19, and the second booster shot administered about a month later will increase that. Experts have warned that we still do not know whether a vaccinated person is able to contract and spread the virus for some time, despite not becoming seriously ill.
California received a combined 33,150 vaccine doses on Monday, as the examiner reports, just over 10 percent of the expected 327,600 total doses the state will receive in this initial allocation. The first batches went to just four cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Eureka. On Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom said 60 percent of the allocation should have arrived in the state, and dozens more cities will receive them. A second Pfizer assignment of an additional 393,900 doses is expected to arrive “early next week.”
“We are embarking on a vaccine distribution that this country or San Francisco has never experienced,” said SF Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax in a statement today. “While this is an important moment to celebrate, we still have a long way to go.”
A second vaccine made by Massachusetts-based biotech company Moderna – which we first heard about participating in trials the day after the lockdowns started here in San Francisco on March 17 – has been shown to be as effective as Pfizer’s, and it will go to expected to be received. urgent FDA approval later this week, with distribution in the coming weeks. California expects to receive more than 670,000 doses of that vaccine.
In a news conference on Monday, Dr. Colfax said the vaccine was “too late” to have any impact on the wave San Francisco is experiencing in new cases and hospitalization. He estimated that there are currently more than 2,800 active COVID cases in the city and added, “With so many viruses, you can’t get away with bad behavior.”