Respiratory therapist Vita Susin gets the first COVID-19 vaccination at UCI Health.
With much anticipation, UCI Medical Center received an initial shipment of the COVID-19 vaccine in mid-December, and began providing the first round of injections to its front-line healthcare workers.
UCI Health was allotted some 3,000 units of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccinations were given to frontline healthcare workers with a full roll out to its frontline clinical staff members who care for patients in high-risk settings or patients with unknown COVID-19 status.
2,000 people were initially given the vaccine in five priority groups that identified, A through E. This includes nurses and physicians in the emergency department and ICU staff and physicians, critical care clinicians, respiratory therapists and anesthesiologists, environmental services and dietary services, among others.
UCI Health is committed to ensuring that all its staff members have access to the vaccine as more doses are available.
“Our entire workforce is meeting this challenge while maintaining a high level of care for patients, both COVID and others,” says UCI Health CEO Chad Lefteris.
“Our UCI Health team is very, very excited to have this vaccine available — more than 500 people signed up within the first hour the vaccination schedule opened,” says UCI Health CEO Chad Lefteris.
“Our entire workforce is meeting this challenge while maintaining a high level of care for patients, both COVID and others. We are the only level I trauma center, regional burn center and tertiary care center for a county of more than 3.2 million people — our community knows they can count on UCI Health.”
A number of UCI Health teams have literally been working around the clock to prepare for receiving, handling and distributing the Pfizer vaccine to the approximately 15,000 people who work within the UCI Health system.
Since UCI Health provides influenza vaccinations to its thousands of healthcare workers every year, an infrastructure is in place to support this effort.
However, numerous challenges posed by the novel nature of the Pfizer vaccine include ensuring the appropriate temperature control at every step in the handling, storage and vaccination process, collecting consent forms from each recipient and coordinating with staff members to ensure there is no disruption in patient care.
As an academic health system, UCI Health has several facilities well-suited for the demands of handling this vaccine, which requires deep-freeze storage and has very specific dose preparation requirements. These freezers are available and have been set up in vaccination stations.
Because there aren’t enough doses yet for everyone across the nation, initial supplies of vaccine will be given to those who need it most. The expected order of vaccinations as determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are:
- Healthcare workers
- People in nursing homes and care facilities
- Essential workers, which includes teachers, first-responders, law enforcement officials and people with food and agriculture jobs
- Adults with underlying conditions and those over age 65
- All other adults
Pfizer Or Moderna?
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses given three to four weeks apart.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are, effectively, twin vaccines. It is remarkable to be in the position of having two mRNA vaccines, both of which involve the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in large twin trials of more than 30,000 participants each. Both vaccines were shown to give protection of 94-95% against COVID-19. In fact, this is exactly what scientists like to see – generalizable evidence that shows the same results when tested twice by two completely different companies in two completely different large trials.
- All available data suggests that these vaccines perform highly similarly. In fact, the data are so close that differences in percentages are not statistically meaningful, and the performance of these vaccines is effectively the same. For example, the following would suggest no difference between the vaccines:
- Protection of 95% (Pfizer) vs 94% (Moderna) from COVID-19 is statistically identical.
- Protection from severe disease of 89% (Pfizer) vs 100% (Moderna) is also highly similar. Note the 89% for Pfizer was due to one case of COVID that did not require hospitalization.
Protection in the elderly is likely the same but cannot be directly compared, since the two companies did not use the same cut-points. Pfizer reported 94% protection in those >55 years old and Moderna reported 86% protection in those >65 years old. It is possible that the Pfizer vaccine would have a lower protection effect if they reported data for those 65+ years old.
Side effects are also remarkably similar. These include fatigue, headache, muscle aches, joint pain, chills and fever. After the first dose, the percent of people who reported having any symptoms was 59% with Pfizer and 55% with Moderna. After the second dose, Pfizer had 70% and Moderna had 79%. Notably, 42-47% of people who received placebo in both trials reported symptoms, so that the true number of symptoms due to the vaccine is likely far less than reported.
In summary, these two vaccines appear to perform nearly identically and there should be no scientific reason thus far to favor one vaccine over the other if offered either one. As a reminder, you should receive both doses of the vaccine from the same manufacturer.
Currently more than 10,000 vaccines have been given to frontline health care workers. An estimated 40 million doses (enough for 20 million people) is expected to be available from the manufacturers with some shipments arriving in December of 2020, and continuing shipments arriving this year.