DANVILLE – Geisinger’s President and CEO says the health system is ready to receive the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines very soon.
In a recent press briefing, Dr. Jaewon Ryu says the Pfizer vaccine is on track to come first, “I think the Pfizer is probably a step ahead at this point. The first batches we’ll see fairly quickly, within the next several weeks.”
Dr. Ryu says Geisinger has a team working on its distribution plan, “It’ll be the front line healthcare workers and even within that, probably areas that are almost exclusively seeing COVID patients…that’ll probably be the front of prioritization. But then, other health care workers, those who are higher risk patients, and it’ll cascade from there.”
Geisinger says it has multiple freezers capable of storing adequate quantities of the vaccine. Geisinger says the Pfizer vaccine specifically can be stored for a maximum of six months, stored in refrigerators for 24 hours and must be used within six hours of being at room temperature. Geisinger is using this information to inform its planning for storing the vaccine and how it will schedule people to receive it.
While this is all good news, Dr. Ryu again is warning the public the vaccination process is going to go well into 2021, “For the companies to manufacture and distribute enough doses…to meaningfully get penetrated throughout the populations and all the communities across the country…that will still take months. We still think its the better part of six months or maybe even more.”
Hear more of Dr. Ryu’s comments at WKOK.com.
