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Boston Medical Center Becomes First Massachusetts Hospital To Receive COVID Vaccine Shipment

BOSTON (CBS) – The first round of COVID-19 vaccines for front line workers arrived at Boston Medical Center Monday morning. The shipment from Pfizer arrived around 9 a.m.

Boston Medical Center received 1,950 doses and employees immediately began storing them in a freezer.

Boston Medical Vaccine
The first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines is put into storage at Boston Medical Center. (WBZ-TV)

The hospital is expected to begin issuing vaccines Wednesday, with plans to complete 1,000 shots by Sunday.

"This week, we will begin the first wave of vaccinations to front line health care workers, a group including doctors and nurses from our ICU and Emergency Department, but just as importantly, employees from environmental and support services, and other crucial support positions that work in COVID-positive patient areas," a hospital spokesman said.

Tufts Medical Center is expecting their first shipment to arrive on Tuesday. Other hospitals in Massachusetts are expected to receive their shipments early this week as well.

"It's about your risk of being face to face with a COVID positive patient," said BMC chief pharmacy officer David Twitchell, noting that it won't just be doctors and nurses receiving the vaccine. "So the obvious ones people understand is the emergency room, the ICU. We have designated COVID positive floors. So that can be anyone from the nurse and physician which everyone knows about, to the (Environmental Services) technician, the person who cleans the room has to go in that COVID positive room. We went through thousands of names and we've been doing this for weeks so we could do it carefully, and made sure we understood where people were going and if they were going to be in that space they were able to be prioritized."

"We want to administer the vaccine as soon we can to all of our eligible employees," said Dr. Paul Biddinger, who chairs Massachusetts' Vaccine Advisory Group. He said the goal is to dole-out every available dose in Massachusetts as soon as possible. "Ideally we'd love to give that 59.000 within a week, it's an incredibly aggressive timeline," he said.'

Vaccines also arrived in Rhode Island and New Hampshire on Monday.

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