Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is the next to be considered for emergency use authorization in the United States after the vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech was approved last week.

Shipments of a second vaccine are likely to coming soon as the FDA gives authorization for the Moderna vaccine.

“The FDA found no serious safety concerns with the Moderna vaccine and affirmed its 95% efficacy,” Gov. JB Pritzker said.

Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are similar in terms of dosage. Both vaccines require two doses with three weeks in between for Pfizer and four weeks for Moderna. However, they differ in storage. Moderna does not require extremely low temperatures. It is likely that the Pfizer vaccine stays at hospitals when it comes to distribution.

“Using that to vaccinate healthcare workers makes more sense than taking that to the long-term care facilities, so it might be that Moderna is used more for that upfront than the Pfizer vaccine,” said Dr. Stephen Schrantz, University of Chicago Medicine.

Moderna has yet to reveal details about its vaccine and distribution plan. Unlike Pfizer, Moderna is a small company that will work with outside contractors.

“The whole distribution plan with Moderna is very different from Pfizer because essentially there is a company called McKesson that is going to handle the entire distribution of the vaccine,” said Hani Mahmassani, director of Northwestern University Transportation.

When Moderna arrives at its destination points, handling the vaccine will be easier than Pfizer due to the less extreme temperature requirements, according to Professor Mahmassani. The Moderna vaccine will be coming from the East Coast instead of Michigan and Wisconsin, where the Pfizer vaccine is located, Mahmassani added.
“From day one, when people ask me, ‘What can go wrong?’ I said, ‘Weather,'” Mahmassani said.

The vaccine will likely not be from Moderna or Pfizer by the time most people get the vaccine. Experts said there will likely be another vaccine in the pipeline that requires one dose and regular refrigeration.

State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs and State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers were among the first in the state to receive a recently approved COVID-19 vaccine, receiving the shots during a news conference Monday.

Dobbs, Byers, and other health officials have given pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s vaccine, which already is being distributed to hundreds of providers across the state.

“It’s a big day,” Dobbs said. “We are extremely excited to have a vaccine that is not only extremely effective based on the clinical studies but also seems to have a very favorable side-effect profile. We know how deadly, devastating, and disruptive coronavirus has been for the state of Mississippi.”

The vaccine received emergency use authorization in the U.S. from the Food and Drug Administration Friday.

Dobbs took the vaccine in front of a virtual audience Monday as a show of confidence in the vaccine’s effectiveness and to encourage others to do the same. Mississippi has seen a significant rise in cases over the past several weeks, due in large part to holiday gatherings. Dobbs has recently advocated more strongly for several health guidelines, including wearing facial coverings and social distancing, as cases have increased not only in the state but across the country.

Several other healthcare professionals and organizations in the U.S. also highly publicized their employees being immunized, underscoring its importance and attempting to dispel widespread fears.

Which hospitals are getting the vaccines in Mississippi?

Vaccines began shipping over the weekend to hospitals across the nation and frontline healthcare workers will be the first to receive them. Dobbs said two medical centers in the state have already received their allocations of the vaccine. All Mississippi hospitals will eventually receive an allotment, he said, but when they will receive them will be based on availability.

Marc Rolph, director of communications and marketing for the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said the network received 780 vials of the vaccine — enough for 3,900 doses — on Monday. The hospital anticipates it will begin vaccinating its employees using a tiered system on Wednesday.

More facilities will receive their allocations Tuesday and Wednesday. Dobbs said that five medical centers in the state have the equipment required to store the vaccine on-site, but declined to name them, citing safety and security reasons. Other medical centers and rural hospitals in the state will receive the vaccine through the health department with their partnership with UMMC, he said.

Some long-term care facilities already receiving vaccinations

Although critical healthcare workers will be the first to be eligible to receive the vaccinations in Mississippi, taking them will not be mandatory. Dobbs has said he does not anticipate a state mandate requiring the vaccination, but private companies could require them as a condition of employment.

On Monday, some long-term care facilities in the state also began vaccinating their staff and residents, he said.

“The vaccines won’t be in arms immediately, but we have gotten word from our (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) partners that we have enough to kick it off,” Dobbs said.

Byers added that once more allotments make it to the state, there will be enough doses to vaccinate every staff member and resident in those facilities across Mississippi.

A vaccine from Massachusetts-based Moderna is set to be reviewed for emergency use authorization by the FDA on Thursday. Byers said the health department currently estimates it will receive 50,000 doses of that vaccine when it is approved, but those numbers are not yet finalized.

Once more doses are available in the state, some healthcare workers will be able to receive vaccinations through drive-thru locations already being used for testing. Jim Craig, the senior deputy and director of the health department’s office of health protection, said this may begin in January.

This is the second time this year that the Cathedral has marked the ever-growing death toll from COVID-19 in the United States.

In September, the Cathedral tolled its bell 200 times after the United States crossed a grim milestone of 200,000 deaths from the virus.

In a written statement, the Cathedral’s dean, the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, said he had grown weary of tolling this bell. “God forgives us if we find ourselves tolling this bell again at 400,000 lives lost,” he wrote in his statement.

The U.S. added nearly 200,000 newly reported Covid-19 cases, and set a record for hospitalizations for the 10th day in a row, as the rollout of one vaccine expanded across the country and another looked set for approval.

The nation reported more than 198,000 new cases for Tuesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, up from Monday’s 192,805 but down from the record 233,133 reported for Friday. It was also lower than the 219,772 cases reported a week earlier on Dec. 8.

The number of cases reported each day tends to be lower at the beginning of the week and rise toward the end of the week, as fewer people are tested over the weekend.

There were 112,816 people hospitalized with the disease on Tuesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project, the 10th record-high day in a row. That included a record-high 21,897 in intensive care.

Also on Tuesday, more U.S. hospitals began receiving shipments of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. Pfizer and logistics companies continued distribution of the two-dose vaccine, as they worked to meet the government’s goal of distributing millions of doses to 636 sites across the country by Wednesday. About 2.9 million doses are set to be delivered by the end of the weekend to more than 1,000 locations.

In addition, the Food and Drug Administration said the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Moderna is “highly effective,” suggesting the vaccine could soon be added to the arsenal against the pandemic. The findings from Moderna and the FDA will go before an independent panel on Thursday. The second major U.S. coronavirus vaccine could be shipped by this weekend.

While vaccines are rolled out, states continue to grapple with rising numbers of patients and fatalities. California, which has logged more than 1.65 million cases in total, the most of any state, reported 33,249 for Tuesday, according to Johns Hopkins data. It reported its second-highest number of deaths in a day, with 276, just lower than the record-high 278 deaths reported for Aug. 14,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that the state was preparing for a surge in deaths. Among other measures, Mr. Newsom said the state has stockpiled 5,000 more body bags, stationed 60 refrigerated storage containers, and activated a mutual aid system for the county coroners.

Nationwide, more than 16.7 million people have been infected and 303,849 have died, according to Johns Hopkins data. Globally, more than 73.5 million have been infected and more than 1.63 million have died.

Shipments of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine are expected to arrive today at seven Houston-area hospitals.

Methodist Hospital is set to receive more than 5,000 doses, which is part of its 13,650 allotments. The shipments will arrive at the loading dock between 7 a.m. and 9:30 a.m.

The first round of frontline hospital workers, including the nurses and doctors who deal directly with COVID-19 patients, will get that shot in the arm today.

When the vaccines arrive, they’ll go into freezers with a temperature of -80 degrees Celcius. That’s about -112 degrees Fahrenheit, which is colder than the surface of Mars.

The doses will be stored in the freezer room until they’re ready to thaw for the shots.

The first person who will be vaccinated at Methodist, the nursing director for emergency services, Johnie Leonard.

Leonard says that when she receives the vaccine, she’ll be thinking of her 95-year-old mother. She told that who she will get the shot for, the family members we haven’t been able to see or hug in months.

Leonard encourages everyone to get it for someone they love.

“That is the one thing that you can do that can help the entire country and your neighborhood. I anticipate going over, taking it, and getting right back to work,” she said.

Officials have only five minutes to move the vials into a freezer to make sure they stay cold enough to be effective. The stakes are high with the vaccine as it’s all about timing.

“We’ve got to have a thawing time of 30 minutes. If we thaw it out, it lasts us up to six hours. So we’ve got six hours of administration time,” explained Binita Patel with Memorial Hermann Pharmacy Services.

The first doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine arrived Monday in Texas.

MD Anderson Cancer Center was one of four sites in the state to receive 4,875 of the 19,500 doses of the vaccine sent out Monday morning.
“They’ve been preparing for quite some time to manage cold chain storage and they’ve also undergone training for the reconstitution and preparation of the vaccine when it needs to be administered in the clinic,” said MD Anderson Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Welela Tereffe.

More than 80 nurses have volunteered to administer it and they will begin giving the vaccine on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Memorial Hermann’s hospital system is slated to get a total of 16,575 doses and will begin administering the vaccine this week.

It’s unclear how much of that allotment will arrive today, but officials have been preparing with super-cold freezers to store the Pfizer vaccine.

“We actually had to buy these ultra-low freezers because most hospitals don’t have these types of freezers. You don’t need them for traditional medication,” said Patel.

“To put that in perspective, between our employees and our affiliated physicians, we’re in the 31,000-32,000 employee basis so when you start to think about how do we vaccinate the very front line, that 13,650 will actually do a very good job for us at getting into a pretty good proportion of our staff,” said Dr. Marc Boom, the President, and CEO of Houston Methodist.

Even while health officials say they can finally see light at the end of the tunnel with the arrival of the vaccine, a lot of steps still need to be taken in between shipments and giving the vaccine to Houstonians.

According to health leaders in the state, healthcare providers, or workers inside medical facilities, along with nursing home residents and staff, will be the first to get the vaccine. Officials say the focus is on facilities that indicated they will vaccinate at least 975 frontline health care workers since that is the minimum order for the Pfizer vaccine.

Additional shipments are expected to occur later in the week. In all, Texas was allocated 224,250 doses of vaccine to be shipped to 110 providers across the state in Week 1 of distribution.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Friday, Dec. 11. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention then accepted a recommendation from an advisory committee for doses to be distributed to people ages 16 and older.

A spokesperson told Eyewitness News the first round of 3,900 doses will go to the Texas Medical Center location and they expect 975 doses at both Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus in Katy and Texas Children’s Hospital in The Woodlands.

Below is a list of hospitals across Texas and the Houston area receiving the vaccine today:

Tuesday, Dec. 15

• Amarillo: Texas Tech Univ. Health Science Center Amarillo

• Corpus Christi: Christus Spohn Health System Shoreline

• Dallas: Parkland Hospital

• Dallas: UT Southwestern

• Edinburg: Doctors Hospital at Renaissance

• Edinburg: UT Health RGV Edinburg

• El Paso: University Medical Center El Paso

• Fort Worth: Texas Health Resources Medical Support

• Galveston: University of Texas Medical Branch Hospital

• Houston: Texas Children’s Hospital Main

• Houston: LBJ Hospital

• Houston: CHI St. Luke’s Health

• Houston: Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center

• Houston: Houston Methodist Hospital

• Houston: Ben Taub General Hospital

• Lubbock: Covenant Medical Center

• San Angelo: Shannon Pharmacy

• Temple: Baylor Scott and White Medical Center

• Tyler: UT Health Science Center Tyler

A second vaccine, produced by Moderna, is under consideration by the FDA and could be authorized late this week. Moderna’s vaccine will be available in batches of 100 doses.

Receiving the COVID-19 vaccine is voluntary. However, experts say 60 to 80 percent of the population has to be vaccinated to potentially end the pandemic.