Page 60 - BusinessWest December 21, 2020

Shot in the Arm
Here Come the COVID Vaccines — but Hurdles Remain
BAy Joseph Bednar
s COVID-19 vaccines begin to roll off production lines, many questions remain — about how quickly they’ll
reach the general public, about long-term effi- cacy and safety, about how many Americans will actually want one.
But on one issue, there is no doubt, Dr. Andrew Artenstein said.
“This is a spectacular achievement just to get where we’ve gotten so far, and I think we should appreciate that,” the chief physician executive and chief academic officer at Baystate Health told BusinessWest. “It’s been a whirlwind, and I mean that in a good way.”
Everyone in healthcare understands the upside — the dramatic promise — of a vaccine as the COVID-19 pandemic enters its 10th month.
“A vaccine is a major component of getting on the other side of this,” Artenstein added. “It’s not the only component, but it’s an important and necessary piece of shortening the duration of this pandemic and possibly preventing future waves.”
With Pfizer gaining emergency-use authori- zation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to begin distributing its vaccine — and Moderna expected to do the same — the Baker-Polito administration announced alloca- tion and distribution plans for the first round of vaccine shipments to Massachusetts, expected
to begin around Dec. 15. The state’s first ship- ment of 59,475 doses of the Pfizer vaccine was ordered from the federal government and will be delivered directly to 21 hospitals across eight counties, as well as to the Department of Public Health immunization lab.
Doses will then be redistributed for access to 74 hospitals across all 14 counties for frontline medical workers. Another 40,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine will be allocated to the Federal Pharmacy Program to begin vaccinating staff and residents of skilled-nursing facilities and assist- ed-living residences in Massachusetts.
In all, Massachusetts is expecting 300,000 doses of vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna to be delivered by the end of December. Both vaccines require two doses administered three to four weeks apart. While all delivery dates and quantities are subject to change due to ongo- ing federal approval and allocation, state leaders expect to receive and distribute more than 2 mil- lion doses to priority population groups by the end of March.
“It does make perfect sense,” Artenstein said of the prioritization plans, which reflect judg- ments on the federal level and ensure delivery to groups like healthcare workers, first responders, the elderly, and people with co-morbidities before the rest of the public. In the case of seniors, for
Dr. Andrew Artenstein says the public should not let down their guard when it comes to masking and social distancing while they wait for the vaccine.
example, “it’s not that they’re more likely to get the virus, necessarily, but they’re more likely to die if they get infected. They do worse.”
Meanwhile, he added, healthcare workers have a greater risk of coronavirus exposure than most other people.
“We’ve been inundated — inundated — with calls from other groups that they want the vac-
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