Whatcom Health Department has these plans for when COVID-19 vaccines are ready
Recent news about potentially effective COVID-19 vaccines are providing some hope in the battle against the virus but widespread distribution is still a ways off, public health officials said.
Drugmaker Pfizer was first to report early, promising results, followed by Moderna this month. On Monday, Nov. 23, AstraZeneca said its vaccine was effective, and, unlike the first two, easy to store, according to Associated Press reporting.
However, subsequent questions have been raised about the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine, according to news reports.
All three vaccines are still going through the regulatory approval process. Pfizer was the first to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization.
As they wait, health officials in Washington state and Whatcom County are planning for distribution of a vaccine, in initially small numbers, that could come in December
As they wait, health officials continue to warn people against letting down their guard as new cases continue to surge in Whatcom County and the U.S.
“This hope of a vaccine does not absolve us in the fall or winter from what could be additional spread, sickness and death,” Erika Lautenbach, director of the Whatcom Health Department, said to the County Council earlier in November.
It’s important to carry on with efforts to slow transmission of the illness during the vaccine wait, officials said.
“The information coming out about these two vaccine candidates is really encouraging at this stage. We certainly hope that a thoroughly vetted, safe and effective vaccine becomes available soon, but it’s important to remember that even once there are COVID-19 vaccine options approved, it will take some time before it is widely available and enough people have been immunized that it’s safe to return to our normal day-to-day lives,” said Amy Cloud, spokesperson for Whatcom Unified Command.
Cloud was responding to questions sent by The Bellingham Herald when only Pfizer and Moderna had made their announcements.
“Even once a vaccine is available, we will still need to keep wearing masks, spreading out, testing, tracing and limiting social interactions for a while. News about these vaccines is progress, but it’s not quite the end,” Cloud said.
Vaccine on its way?
Plans from health officials will include who will get the vaccine and when as the initial supplies are expected to be rationed. Pfizer, for example, has said it could have 50 million doses available worldwide by the end of the year with possibly 25 million for the U.S. in December, according to AP. There are over 330 million U.S. residents.
The makeup of the priority groups for the vaccine will come via state and federal guidelines, according to Cloud.
In Washington, who will first get the vaccine will be set by the state Department of Health, she added.
The state, in turn, is looking to guidance from two federal groups working on recommendations for who should get first access — the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
“In general, while there is limited supply of the vaccine during phase 1, we’ll prioritize vaccine administration for the highest-risk groups,” Cloud said.
Those groups could include high-risk health workers and first-responders, such as law enforcement and emergency medical services; people of all ages who have health conditions that put them at significantly higher risk for COVID-19, such as people with asthma and heart conditions; and older adults living in congregate settings, such as long-term care facilities, local health officials said.
“Our job at the local level will be to identify these groups of people within Whatcom County so that we can assess the availability of the vaccine to them and ensure that they have access to it,” Cloud said.
Pfizer could be first
On Wednesday, Nov. 25, the state Department of Health announced that it hoped to be able to administer, by mid-December, the estimated 62,400 doses of the Pfizer vaccine that the federal government has allocated to Washington.
That’s if the vaccine receives emergency use authorization and makes it through the vetting by the western states’ Scientific Safety Review Workgroup, to which Washington state belongs.
“This workgroup will provide another layer of scrutiny and expert review to this process and should take about one to two days,” the state said in its latest update of its vaccine distribution plan. “This will be done while the vaccine is still being processed and shipped, so it should not cause any delay in making vaccine available to people in Washington.”
The first people eligible to receive the vaccine are high-risk workers in health care settings for phase 1A of the distribution plan, the state said, adding it will share more details about vaccine phases in the coming weeks.
It wasn’t known Friday, Nov. 27, if any of those initial Pfizer doses were headed to Whatcom County.
Subsequent allocations could total about 200,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine by the end of December, the state said, with regular weekly shipments likely starting in January.
State officials said they didn’t yet have a timeline for the Moderna vaccine, adding that they would know more once Moderna submitted its application for emergency use authorization.
Vaccine storage
Health officials at the state and local level also are learning about the handling and storage requirements for the vaccines as information becomes available, including the temperature they need to be kept at.
AstraZeneca said its vaccine could be kept in a refrigerator for at least six months; Moderna said for a month; and Pfizer said for five days, according to The New York Times.
Otherwise, Pfizer’s can be stored in special coolers for up to two weeks or what has been described as ultra-cold freezers, creating concern about the viability of rural hospitals for storage.
“Fortunately, locations that do not have ultra-cold storage capacity can still store this vaccine in the special thermal shipper the vaccine comes in,” the state Health Department said. “This allows additional sites to receive the vaccine as long as they can vaccinate at least 975 people in 20 days.”
St. Joseph hospital in Bellingham has been identified as one of a handful of sites in Washington state that would be able to store vaccines that require ultra-cold storage, PeaceHealth Northwest Chief Executive Charles Prosper told The Herald in a previous story.
“Each vaccine will have unique storage and handling requirements,” Cloud said. “We can’t say what DOH’s plans are for vaccine storage at the state level, but at the county level, our team is assessing storage capacity locally. We do know there is some local capacity, and we are making plans to increase storage capacity for our community if needed.”
Once the vaccine or vaccines get here, the Whatcom County Health Department doesn’t plan to directly provide it to the public unless it identifies gaps in availability, as it did with COVID-19 testing before launching its mobile sites, according to Lautenbach.
“It is not our primary role as a local health department to be the administer of the vaccine but we will ensure our providers are doing that,” Lautenbach said.
There are a lot of questions about how the vaccine will be rolled out, Lautenbach said, adding that the county health department is working with the state on the matter and “we’ll be ready when the vaccine is ready.”
