Oregon will become the 49th state on Wednesday to begin vaccinating its health workers and residents of long-term care facilities against COVID-19 – two days after the first shipments arrived early Monday morning.
A group of health professionals from North Portland’s Legacy Emanuel Medical Center is expected to be the first in the state to be injected with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, followed by employees from Oregon Health & Science University in Southwest Portland and the Saint Alphonsus Medical Center in Ontario on the Oregon-Idaho border.
Officials from the Oregon Health Authority and the Kate Brown office on Tuesday did not immediately answer questions about why the introduction of the vaccine in Oregon takes two days to begin and whether that indicates problems with Oregon planning or distribution.
Many states received their first shipments on Sunday evening or early Monday morning. Oregon’s first pack of 975 doses arrived at 6:45 a.m. Monday.
By Tuesday afternoon, 48 states and the District of Columbia had already started their first injections. Except Oregon, only Tennessee had not yet vaccinated its first resident.
According to The Tennessean, the state received its first doses on Monday, but put them in storage as a reserve supply because state leaders decided there was no fair way to decide which hospital received the doses first. Gov. Bill Lee said fairness should trump speed, the news organization said.
On Wednesday in Oregon, the governor’s office will live stream the three hospitals vaccinating their first employees with the vaccine. Legacy Health received its first shipments Monday, and OHSU and Saint Alphonsus Medical Center had said their first shipments would arrive Tuesday.
The livestream starts Wednesday at 11 a.m. The public can watch here.
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– Aimee Green; [email protected]; @Oh_Amee