Hilton Head, Coastal Carolina hospitals receive 1st COVID-19 vaccine shipment
It’s the beginning of the end for Beaufort County’s coronavirus outbreak.
The first COVID-19 vaccines were administered to local health care workers and others across South Carolina early this week, as infections continued to surge in every corner of the state and S.C. leaders pleaded with residents to take the deadly pathogen seriously.
Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine, which was approved for emergency use late Friday, arrived in Beaufort County on Wednesday, as Hilton Head and Coastal Carolina hospitals began to inoculate staff.
Dr. Amy Ramey, an emergency room physician, was one of the first to get a shot on Hilton Head.
Wearing scrubs and a light blue mask mid-afternoon Wednesday, Ramey was quiet as a nurse injected the Pfizer dose into her upper left arm.
The nurse later told Ramey she would be eligible to receive the vaccine’s second dose on Jan. 6 and provided the doctor a card with information about the process.
“It’s a relief,” said Ramey, who has worked at Hilton Head Hospital for seven years. “I think the vaccine will save a lot of lives, and it’s important to trust it and trust the people that’ve developed it.”
Daisy Burroughs, a spokesperson for Tenet Healthcare, which owns the two hospitals, didn’t immediately know how many doses were on site Wednesday or how many employees were vaccinated.
Dr. James Gigante also received the vaccine in front of reporters. The shot took a few seconds to administer. It felt like a “small pinch,” he said.
“It’s such an accomplishment. Now, the really hard part is getting everyone vaccinated and getting it out to everybody,” said Gigante, an internist. The vaccine has “so few side effects,” he added.
“I have no reservations,” he said.
The inoculations marked a turning point for the county’s COVID-19 outbreak, which has claimed the lives of at least 94 local residents, infected more than 8,000 people, devastated area businesses and ground life as we once knew it to a halt.
“We haven’t yet reached the end of this long road, but I have great hope now,” wrote Dr. Linda Bell, the state’s top epidemiologist, in a statement Wednesday.
Hilton Head and Coastal Carolina hospitals are both enrolled in the state’s vaccine distribution network, but there’s a limited supply of doses for now. Not every provider in South Carolina will get Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine this week.
Beaufort Memorial Hospital, for example, had not received doses as of early Wednesday, according to spokesperson Courtney McDermott.
The general public also won’t have access to vaccines until sometime in 2021. That means residents will have to follow various COVID-19 health recommendations for the foreseeable future, like wearing a face mask when in public, experts say.
S.C. officials, though, are optimistic.
“Together, we can defeat this invisible enemy that has held us hostage in 2020,” Bell wrote Wednesday.
Army Gen. Gustave F. Perna, chief operating officer of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed, told reporters Saturday that Pfizer’s vaccine would arrive at 145 sites across the United States on Monday, 425 sites on Tuesday and 66 sites on Wednesday.
The vaccine, BNT162b2, was approved for emergency use late Friday.
Several large S.C. hospitals and health care systems had received vaccines as of Wednesday morning. The Medical University of South Carolina, Prisma Health and Lexington Medical Center all began to inoculate staff Tuesday. Conway Medical Center administered doses on Monday.
Pfizer is shipping most of its vaccines this week directly to facilities enrolled in the state’s distribution network.
S.C. health officials previously said they expect to get nearly 43,000 doses of the vaccine by Wednesday, with up to 56 locations receiving their first batches this week.
One of those locations is a “centralized distributing site,” which can help send doses to smaller providers elsewhere in the state, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
If hospitals don’t receive a direct Pfizer shipment soon, they could get doses via DHEC’s centralized site, in theory.
It’s still unclear, though, when that might happen.
Vaccines this month are being set aside for critical health care workers and residents and staff at long-term care facilities.
“Nurses and people who work in hospitals and clean rooms, they’re getting burned out,” Gigante, the internist, said Wednesday. COVID-19 hospitalizations in South Carolina have spiked in recent weeks.
MUSC, Prisma Health, Lexington Medical Center and Conway Medical Center accounted for almost 19,000 Pfizer doses in total as of Wednesday.
DHEC, meanwhile, is expecting 200,000 to 300,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines by year’s end, including from biotech company Moderna, whose vaccine will likely be approved Friday or Saturday for emergency use.
Moderna’s vaccine, mRNA-1273, could be available as early as next week.
“We were able to do this in such a short time,” said Ramey, the emergency room physician, of developing a COVID-19 vaccine. “I hope that everybody gets vaccinated.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 12:32 PM.
