BERN TWP., Pa. – The first doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine have arrived in Berks County.
UPS delivered a shipment Thursday afternoon to Penn State Health’s St. Joseph Medical Center in Bern Township.
Kelsey Overfield, Clinical Services Coordinator for Pharmacists at Penn State Health St. Joseph Medical Center, will open the hospital’s first shipment of the hospital’s Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, December 17, 2020.
Kelsey Overfield, the hospital’s pharmacy clinic coordinator, unpacked the 975 dos and put them in cold storage, where they will be kept until staff inoculations begin in the next few days.
St. Joe’s said it has developed plans to divide the vaccine into three stages, following recommended guidelines from the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Employees on the front lines of the pandemic are offered the first vaccinations.
Reading Hospital also received a shipment of COVID-19 vaccines on Thursday, but it gave no information on how many doses it received or when the vaccinations will begin.
Meanwhile, a second COVID-19 vaccine got closer to the US fight against the pandemic Thursday as government advisers gathered for a public evaluation of its safety and effectiveness.
It is the penultimate step for the vaccine developed by drug company Moderna and the National Institutes of Health. The panel of doctors and medical researchers endorsed it. The move will now be followed in hours or days by the approval of the Food and Drug Administration.
Penn State Health St. Joseph Medical Center received its first shipment of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, December 17, 2020.
Both new vaccines use fragments of the COVID-19 genetic code to train the immune system to detect and fight the virus. Both need two doses weeks apart.