North Shore Hospitals Receive First Doses Of Coronavirus Vaccine

After nine months on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care workers at hospitals on Chicago's North Shore are receiving the first doses of the coronavirus vaccine.

Shortly before 10 a.m. Thursday, NorthShore HealthSystem staff unloaded three boxes of vaccine and supplies from UPS trucks at Glenbrook Hospital. They contain enough to provide 1,950 people an initial dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Hina Patel, a pharmacist at NorthShore and a leader in its vaccine response at Glenbrook Hospital, said the anticipation of the vaccine's arrival had been building for weeks.

"I am so excited. Last night, I couldn't sleep. I was a bit jittery knowing that we would receive our first vaccine from Pfizer this morning," Patel said Thursday.

"Watching our UPS tracking number was probably the most exciting thing I've done in the last 24 hours — except that we received our vaccine this morning, unpacked it and placed it in our ultra-cold freezer."

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The Pfizer vaccine is delivered in two doses, with a booster shot three weeks after the initial jab. Unlike the Moderna vaccine that received approval from an FDA panel Thursday, the Pfizer vaccine must be kept at very low temperatures and used within five days of removal from special freezers or dry ice.

Patel said hospital staff will monitor the temperature of the freezers and refrigerators where the vaccine is being stored to time its removal and make sure it is safe to administer.

"Once we moved it from that ultra-cold box, it went into our ultra-cold freezer," she said. "We are setting that temperature at about -80 degrees centigrade. To give you an idea, your home refrigerators are 2 to 8 centigrade. And so this is a very cold procedure and a very cold freezer, but it keeps that vaccine intact so that we can use it safely later."

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Outside of Chicago, Gov. J.B. Pritzker's administration is distributing an initial allocation of approximately 86,000 doses of the vaccine.

Highland Park Hospital is designated as the regional hospital coordinating center for Region 10, which include both Lake and Cook counties.

Earlier this month, Pritzker's office announced NorthShore University HealthSystem would be a distribution hub for more than 27,000 doses of the initial allotment of vaccines.

It was not clear if those numbers had been adjusted in response to news that the number of vaccines expected to arrive in the coming weeks has been reduced. No information about the Region 10 plan was available from the governor's office Thursday.

NorthShore also operates hospitals in Evanston, Skokie, Highland Park and on Chicago North Side, where is runs Swedish Hospital. Starting during the spring's surge in coronavirus hospitalizations and again when infections rose in the fall, hospital officials reconfigured Glenbrook Hospital to focus on COVID-19 patients.

"We've been working very hard as a team to get our allocation and have it shipped to us," Patel said Thursday morning at Glenbrook.

The Lake County Health Department also received a shipment, anticipated to be about 6,000 doses, Thursday morning, a spokesperson confirmed.

From that allocation, Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital received its first doses of the vaccine, hospital officials said.

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Dr. Jeffrey Kopin, the hospital's chief medical officer, said Thursday was a momentous day.

“Watching the long line of these frontline heroes waiting patiently, and many tearing up with relief when it was their turn to get it, was something none of us will ever forget," Kopin said in a statement.

"We will continue with the employee vaccination process today, and although this is just the beginning of hopefully the end, we want to remind everyone to continue social distancing, wearing masks, and avoiding large groups. We have a long way to go.”

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Also Thursday, Pfizer representatives issued a statement refuting claims of claims in its manufacturing process. It said the company had shipped all 2.9 million doses as directed by federal authorities, but had no direction on where to send the rest.

"We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses," it said.

NorthShore representatives announced plans for a news conference Friday morning with recently vaccinated health care workers.

RELATED: Thousands Vaccinated As Doses Arrive At Hospitals Across Illinois

As of Thursday morning, about 3,400 health care workers outside of Chicago had been vaccinated, according to Pritzker.

The governor said he would be focused on equity for the state's Black and brown communities as the vaccine becomes available to more categories of people after an initial group of health care workers and nursing home residents — and a later group expected to composed of essential workers whose work puts them in contact with the virus.

"We want to make sure that people who may be avoiding getting vaccinated because they hear some information that's false about it, that they have their concerns addressed and that they actually get vaccinated," Pritzker said. "We're going to do everything we can, from not only a communication perspective to those folks, but also demonstrating with people who are from those communities making sure that they're getting vaccinated."

RELATED: Who Is Getting The Coronavirus Vaccine First In Illinois?

On Thursday, the Illinois Department of Public Health reported 8,828 new confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19 and 181 new deaths. There were 4,751 people in the state's hospitals with the virus, more than 1,050 of which were in intensive care units. The seven-day rolling average statewide case positivity was 8.4 percent for the week ending Dec. 16.

Patel, the NorthShore pharmacist handling the Thursday's receipt of the vaccine shipment, said the arrival of the vaccine does not eliminate the need for public health measures to reduce the number of new infections, a proportion of which will lead to hospitalizations and deaths.

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"This gives us hope, because our staff here at the hospital and in our community have been working very hard to tackle COVID-19, and having a vaccine gives us a lot of hope that soon we will be able to resume what we call normal life," Patel said.

"Of course, we know it will will take time, as vaccine will come in waves. So it will take months for everybody to be vaccinated, and in the mean time we know that we have to continue to maintain social distancing, including mask up, back up and wash up," she added. "So that's my message to everybody — stay safe, and as the vaccine comes, we have that hope, and we know that things will get better soon."