Category: Covid-19 Vaccine

The Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine needs to be stored at minus 70 Celsius. Health care providers will need to store it either in dry ice for shorter stints or in specialized freezers. Leon Neal/Getty Images hide caption

The Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine needs to be stored at minus 70 Celsius. Health care providers will need to store it either in dry ice for shorter stints or in specialized freezers.

Two drugmakers, Pfizer and Moderna, have announced promising interim results for their vaccine candidates, raising hopes in the U.S. and abroad that the end of the pandemic may be in sight. But, if and when the vaccines are authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, distributing them presents a daunting challenge.

One big reason? One of the front-runners in the vaccine race the one made by Pfizer needs to be kept extremely cold: minus 70 degrees Celsius, which is colder than winter in Antarctica. Moderna has said that its vaccine needs to be frozen too, but only at minus 20 Celsius, more like a regular freezer.

Since there will be limited vaccine doses at first, immunization managers across the country will need to have plans to distribute any and all vaccine doses that are available. For months, they've been puzzling over the particular challenges presented by the Pfizer vaccine, which requires these ultra-cold conditions.

"I believe it can be done," says Debra Kristensen, a 30-year veteran of vaccine innovation and supply chains at PATH, an international nonprofit focused on public health. "Ebola vaccine, for example, was successfully used in a few African countries and also required this ultra-cold chain storage."

Distributing vaccines in these conditions "is possible, but it's definitely going to be much more expensive and more difficult," she says. Pfizer has tried to calm concerns about the challenges presented by these cold temperatures. It has designed its own packaging to keep doses super cold with dry ice, so that they can be stored for a few weeks without specialized freezers (the packaging has been informally nicknamed "the pizza box").

Moderna's vaccine, Kristensen explains, "can be distributed in more of a standard fashion health workers are used to it, facilities are used to it it's more normal."

Here's some background on why these vaccines need to be kept so cold and how they differ.

Why the deep freeze? Think about M&Ms

To understand why these vaccines need to be frozen, it helps to understand a bit about how they work.

Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine candidates use a new approach to unlock the body's immune defenses. The approach uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to turn a patient's cells into factories that make one particular coronavirus protein.

That protein kicks off an immune response as if there was a real coronavirus infection (to be clear, since it's only one virus protein, there's no way the vaccine could actually infect someone or make them sick with COVID-19). Then, if someone who was immunized gets exposed to the coronavirus later on, their body's immune system will be able to fight it off more easily and they're more likely to avoid serious illness.

It's a vaccine technology that's so new, no mRNA vaccines have ever been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Vaccines made from mRNA can be made much faster than older vaccines could, explains Margaret Liu, a vaccine researcher who chairs the board of the International Society for Vaccines and specializes in genetic vaccines. The problem, says Liu, is that mRNA is "really easily destroyed, and that's because there are many, many enzymes that will just break it apart."

Here's an analogy: Think of the vaccine as a chocolate bar that melts easily. Just as there are ways to keep the chocolate from melting into goo, there are things the drugmakers did to protect their COVID-19 vaccines.

The first step, Liu says, was to modify the mRNA nucleosides the "building blocks" of the RNA vaccine. "They've used modified versions because those are more stable," she says. This would be like changing the chocolate recipe so it's not quite so melty.

The next step was to use lipid nanoparticles, which, Liu explains, "is kind of like putting your chocolate inside a candy coating you have an M&M, so the chocolate doesn't melt."

But even with the stabilized building blocks and lipid coating, the mRNA could still fall apart easily, which is why the vaccine is frozen.

"Everything happens more slowly as you lower the temperature," Liu says. "So your chemical reactions the enzymes that break down RNA are going to happen more slowly." It's the same idea as freezing food to keep it from spoiling.

Because the specific formulations are secret, Liu says, it's not clear exactly why these two mRNA vaccines have different temperature requirements.

"It just comes down to what their data is," she says of Moderna's vaccine. "If their data shows that it's more stable at a certain temperature, that's it."

"Stress testing" to tease out these temperatures

It's possible that Pfizer's vaccine could eventually be shown to be stable in somewhat warmer conditions or for longer times out of the freezer.

To figure out a vaccine's temperature requirements, drugmakers do extensive, time-consuming thermostability studies.

That research involves keeping the vaccine "at other temperatures to see how much you can stress the system," explains Liu. She says you would start at ultra-cold temperatures, then try regular freezer temperature, then refrigerator temperature, and finally room temperature.

You might also put the vaccine at fluctuating temperatures "to sort of mimic what would happen if [a vaccine shipment] got left on a loading dock and something went wrong," Liu says.

Then drugmakers have to analyze the vaccine samples that have been put through all that and do tests (usually in mice) to see if the vaccine still works the way it's supposed to.

All of this is measured in real time. "If a vaccine has a two-year shelf life at refrigerator temperatures, then the manufacturer actually needs to put the vaccine at that refrigerated temperature for two years and see if at the end the product is still effective," Kristensen explains. "Given the urgent need for these COVID-19 vaccines, manufacturers will likely begin releasing them with shorter shelf lives and then they'll expand the shelf life durations as they gather more data."

Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts told NPR "there are ongoing studies on this front," but did not answer whether any imminent changes to the temperature requirements might be coming as a result of those studies.

"I doubt that [Pfizer] will be able to move away from the ultra-cold conditions during initial transport and storage," says Kristensen. "But if they can prove that the vaccine can be kept at refrigerated temperatures for some time after being removed from frozen storage, that helps facilitate distribution and administration out to more remote areas and to specific groups of people."

Temperature requirements call for different distribution plans

Right now, Pfizer says its vaccine needs to be kept at minus 70 degrees Celsius and can last in a specialty freezer for up to six months. The specialty shippers can hold up to five "pizza box" trays of vials and be refreshed with dry ice every five days for up to 15 days to keep the vaccine at the right frozen temperature.

Even that presents challenges, though a Pfizer scientist told a CDC advisory council in August that it's not supposed to be opened more than twice a day and needs to be closed within one minute of opening. Once it's thawed, the vaccine can be refrigerated for five days.

Moderna says its vaccine candidate is stable at regular freezer temperature minus 20 degrees Celsius for up to six months, and after thawing it can last in the refrigerator for 30 days. It can also be kept at room temperature for up to 12 hours. This, explains Kristensen, is useful for health care workers in the field, "because now the vaccine doesn't need to go in and out of the refrigerator each time it's administered."

Given the demand, if both Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines are authorized around the same time, states will figure out how to use both in different settings.

Christine Finley, the immunization manager in Vermont finalizing that state's distribution plan, says it makes sense to think about distributing Pfizer's vaccine to larger population centers, not just because of its temperature, but because the smallest amount you can order is 975 doses (usually it's more like 100 doses or fewer).

"[If] you have a large university where you're going to be able to reach a larger number of people, that would make sense that you might consider distributing your ultra-cold there," she says. The Moderna will work better, she says, "in areas where it might be more difficult to use up such a large order or they may not have the [cold] storage."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency in charge of vaccine distribution and decisions about which groups receive the first shots, has tried to discourage health departments and hospitals from going out and buying expensive freezers to accommodate the Pfizer vaccine. But according to a recent report in Stat, wealthier hospitals are buying up specialized freezers, raising concerns that hospitals with fewer resources or in rural areas will be left behind.

Moderna's announcement may temper those fears, although since Pfizer's vaccine doses will be urgently needed as well, it doesn't mean that ultra-cold storage is no longer an issue.

"I think the best news is that there may be two vaccines that are effective because that means we can reach more people," says Finley. "We still need to show that they're safe and they're effective and we need to build trust with the public so there's still a ways to go, but this is good news."

Despite the excitement and hopes riding on Pfizer and Moderna potentially having the first authorized COVID-19 vaccines, "this really isn't a race," says Liu. "Just by sheer numbers, we probably need multiple, multiple vaccines."

And in the end, she says, "it may be that the second one or the 50th one is actually a better vaccine."

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Why Moderna And Pfizer Vaccines Have Different Cold Storage Requirements : Shots - Health News - NPR

Dr. Anthony Fauci warns "it's not going to be a light switch" back to normalcy even when a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available to the public.

In fact, Fauci recommends people still wear masks and practice social distancing even after getting the vaccine, he told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" on Sunday.

On Monday, Moderna announced that preliminary data showed the Covid-19 vaccine it developed in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseasesis more than 94% effective. The news follows a similar announcement from Pfizer and BioNTech on Nov. 9, which showed their Covid-19 vaccine was above 90% effective.

"Obviously, with a 90-plus percent effective vaccine, you could feel much more confident" about not getting the virus, Fauci told Tapper. "But I would recommend to people to not abandon all public health measures just because you have been vaccinated." Thosefundamentalsinclude: universal wearing of masks, maintaining physical distance, avoiding large crowds, doing more outdoor activities and washing hands frequently.

Because "even though, for the general population, it might be 90[%] to 95% effective," said Fauci, "you don't necessarily know, for you, how effective it is." Even at those success rates, about 5% to 10% of people immunized may still get the virus.

"In addition, the protective effect of a vaccine may take at least one month, if not slightly longer," says Dr. David Ho, avirologistworking on developing monoclonal antibody therapies for Covid-19 at Columbia University. (So far, Pfizer said early results showed its two-dose vaccine showed 90% effectiveness seven days after the second dose. Early data on Moderna's two-dose vaccine showed 94.5% efficacy two weeks after the second dose.)

"Therefore, for the foreseeable future, we will need to continue our mitigation measures, including wearing masks," Ho says, noting that precautionary measures will likely last "for much of 2021."

Dr. Bruce Hirsch, an infectious disease specialist at Northwell Health, adds that many people have strong feelings about vaccines and may not take them, which "will impact the general population from being immune to Covid-19 and prolong the threat of the pandemic."

It is worth noting that as the trials for both vaccines progress, efficacy numbers could change, and it is also not yet clear how long any immunity would last.

Fauci, 79, said when it is his turn to get vaccinated, he doesn't plan on abandoning all the public health measures that he has been advocating during the pandemic.

"I could feel more relaxed, in essentially not having the stringency of it that we have right now, but I think abandoning it completely would not be a good idea," Fauci told Tapper.

Fauci predicted to Tapper that most of the country will get vaccinated in the second or third quarter of 2021. But "we are not going to turn [the pandemic] on and off, going from where we are to completely normal. It's going to be a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go by, as we get well into 2021," he said.

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Dr. Fauci says masks, social distancing will still be needed after a Covid-19 vaccinehere's why - CNBC

The Monday morning announcement from Cambridge-based Moderna that the COVID-19 vaccine it is developing appears to be 94.5% effective is very good news, according to Dr. Ashish Jha.

Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, appeared on CBS This Morning to provide insight into what the news, which follows a week after Pfizer gave a similar update on their vaccines progress, means as the pandemic continues to rage.

We are entering the hardest time of the pandemic, Jha told the network Monday. I think the next two or three months are going to be awful across the country. But [what] the Pfizer vaccine [and the] Moderna vaccine do is give us hope that in a few months, this will really start turning around. The light at the end of the tunnel just got a little bit brighter.

The doctor stressed that there are still logistical and complicated issues that need to be addressed as the work continues toward a rollout of a vaccine.

Weve got to get tens of millions of vaccines out to states, to pharmacies, doctors offices, he said. That needs a lot of planning. There has not been a lot of that planning out of the federal government right now. Theres been some, but we need a lot more of that.

Jha cautioned that even with the promising news on the vaccines being developed, it will be some time before things return to normal.

Even if we had 10 or 20 million people getting vaccinated over the next few months, until we get to 50, 60 percent of the American population vaccinated and thats at best case scenario April/May I think were still some ways away from something that will be the new normal, he said.

And before it gets better, the country is facing a situation where the virus is going to get meaningfully worse in the coming weeks based on the current trends of new cases and hospitalizations, he said.

The bottom line is that hospitals are at capacity and they are still about to get a flood of new patients, so its going to be an even bigger wave of patients, Jha said. So Im very worried about the next month. We know what we need to do. Everybody needs to wear a mask, we need to avoid any kind of indoor gathering. And then states have to do more on testing.

Jha said every state needs to be following the lead of Michigan, which is instituting limits on indoor activities and other events for three weeks to stem the spread of COVID-19. The order from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer includes moving high school and college classes online, closing indoor service at bars and restaurants, shuttering movie theaters and casinos, and pausing youth sports.

What Michigan is doing is absolutely essential, Jha said.

Its amazing to me that other states are not following, he said. I suspect that this week we are going to see a lot of other states step up and essentially put in very similar policies because were so behind the 8-ball. Weve got to get going.

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Watch: What Dr. Ashish Jha had to say about the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine news - Boston.com

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) The race continues to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Several vaccines are in various stages of research and some are starting to break away from the pack, according to Daniel Culver, DO, of Cleveland Clinic.

There are a number of vaccines currently in advanced stage clinical trials, what we call stage three clinical trials, which are really the last stage before application for approval to the FDA, he said.

There are four vaccines, in particular, making their way toward the finish line for approval, hopefully, in the weeks ahead.

Two of those are RNA based vaccines, using a novel strategy thats new to vaccine development.

Two others are using a viral vector, where a cold virus acts as a type of Trojan Horse to attack infection.

Dr. Culver says if one of the vaccines receives emergency use authorization from the FDA, we may hear about an approval in December.

High risk populations, like first responders and healthcare workers, are likely to receive the vaccine first.

If all goes well, the general population may have access in the second or third quarter of 2021.

We probably will want to proceed with multiple vaccines. We still dont know the durability of the vaccines, said Dr. Culver. We still dont know how these will work in relatively uncommon populations, immunocompromised populations, the elderly, and so I dont think we can bank on any one of these, even if its the first one and most effective, to be the one that will ultimately be the best for people.

Dr. Culver reminds us the vaccine information weve heard in the news is still preliminary and should be taken with a grain of salt.

He said its still too early to know whether any of the vaccines being studied will be effective and durable against coronavirus.

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Is the race for a COVID-19 vaccine in the home stretch? - RochesterFirst

In this March 16, 2020, file photo, Neal Browning receives a shot in the first-stage safety study of a potential vaccine for COVID-19 at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. Moderna Inc., said Monday, Nov. 16, its COVID-19 vaccine is proving to be highly effective in a major trial.

This story is part of Houston Public Medias ongoing coronavirus coverage. Click here to see more of our coronavirus news and resources.

Public health officials are optimistic about the chances of a COVID-19 vaccine likely to be distributed in limited supply by the end of this year but medical experts are also cautioning people not to let their guard down, especially as the holiday season rapidly approaches.

Pfizer said it expects to release a COVID-19 vaccine that's 90% effective by the end of November, pending federal approval. Once that happens, state officials will be in charge of distribution. Biotech company Moderna Inc., meanwhile, said its vaccine looks to be 95% effective, and also hopes to ship by the end of 2020.

But dont count on getting it right away. When the vaccine does eventually arrive in Harris County, health care workers, first responders, and those most at risk for COVID-19 will get the initial doses, said Harris County Public Health Director Dr. Umair Shah.

"You're not gonna have enough vaccine initially to be able to cover the entire population," Shah told Houston Public Media. "Those are the areas of prioritization, but we want to be encouraging about getting the vaccine out to our community members as quickly as possible."

THE CORONAVIRUS IN GREATER HOUSTON | See The Latest, On HoustonPublicMedia.org

With cases and hospitalizations again on the rise in Greater Houston going into the holiday season, Shah and other health officials say the news should motivate the community to take mask wearing and social distancing seriously, even while remaining hopeful for the future.

"This is what we all want to see," Shah said. "I would think it's gonna be December or likely in the first part of 2021, when you're really gonna start to see it in local communities like Harris County and in Houston."

No timetable has been given for when a vaccine will be available to Harris County's general population. But the anticipated quick release to first responders had some healthcare workers worried early on.

"I was concerned that we were rushing these vaccines through," said Serena Bumpus, director of practice with the Texas Nurses Association.

But, she added, "to see a 90% efficacy rate for the vaccine, particularly the Pfizer vaccine, that tells me they are taking this seriously and they're looking at this cautiously to ensure that potential side effects could be minimized."

Still, some nurses across the state remain hesitant to take the initial dose, Bumpus said. That's because they're treating COVID-19 patients right now, who are showing confusing initial symptoms.

"Every day we learn something new," she said. "There are some people who are experiencing this virus who've never even had a fever before. It just feels like seasonal allergies, and so it's new developments like that, we're still trying to figure out."

Harris County hospitals collectively reported more than 200 COVID-19 patients in their ICU beds for five out of seven days last week, the highest number since Sept. 12.

The COVID-19 positivity rate at testing sites in Greater Houston is back on the rise, with the Texas Medical Center reporting a reproduction rate above 1.0 for the virus, indicating an increase in spread.

Now, the public health message leading into Thanksgiving is the same as it was just before the summer surge: Wear a mask, socially distance, and wash your hands. Alongside testing and contact tracing, those remain the best defenses against further spread in Harris County, until a vaccine arrives.

"We have something that's going to really be effective, and allow us to see the path forward," Shah said. "Now what we need to do is make sure that the safety data matches the effectiveness data. If you have both, now we've got something, and that's what's encouraging to all of us in public health."

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A COVID-19 Vaccines May Be Coming. But Dont Get Complacent Over The Holidays, Experts Say - Houston Public Media

For me its really cool to be something thats really historic in nature. The other thing I would say is, as the Dean of Students at Tulane, this has been a rough semester. And you see that there are life and death consequences of COVID-19, but this is really impacting all of us everyday, said Woodley.

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Moderna said Monday its COVID-19 vaccine is proving to be highly effective in a major trial, a second dash of hope in the global race for a shot to tame a resurgent virus that is now killing more than 8,000 people a day worldwide.

The company said its vaccine appears to be 94.5% effective, according to preliminary data from Modernas ongoing study. A week ago, competitor Pfizer Inc. announced its own COVID-19 vaccine appeared similarly effective news that puts both companies on track to seek permission within weeks for emergency use in the U.S.

The results are truly striking, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. governments top infectious diseases expert. Earlier this year, Fauci said he would be happy with a COVID-19 vaccine that was 60% effective.

A vaccine cant come fast enough, as virus cases topped 11 million in the U.S. over the weekend 1 million of them recorded in just the past week and governors and mayors are ratcheting up restrictions ahead of Thanksgiving. The pandemic has killed more than 1.3 million people worldwide, over 245,000 of them in the U.S.

Dr. Stephen Hoge, Modernas president, welcomed the really important milestone but said having similar results from two different companies is whats most reassuring.

That should give us all hope that actually a vaccine is going to be able to stop this pandemic and hopefully get us back to our lives, Hoge told The Associated Press. He added: It wont be Moderna alone that solves this problem. Its going to require many vaccines to meet the global demand.

The National Institutes of Health helped create the vaccine Moderna is manufacturing, and NIHs director, Dr. Francis Collins, said the exciting news from two companies gives us a lot of confidence that were on the path towards having effective vaccines.

But were also at this really dark time, he warned, saying people cant let down their guard during the months it will take for doses of any vaccines cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to start reaching a large share of the population.

If the FDA allows emergency use of Modernas or Pfizers candidate, there will be limited, rationed supplies before the end of the year.

Both vaccines require people to get two shots, several weeks apart. U.S. officials said they hope to have about 20 million Moderna doses and another 20 million doses of the vaccine made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech to use in late December.

Exactly who is first in line is yet to be decided. But Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the hope is that enough doses are available by the end of January to vaccinate adults over 65, who are at the highest risk from the coronavirus, and health care workers. Fauci said it may take until spring or summer for enough for anyone who is not high risk and wants a shot to get one.

Another important message: Additional vaccines that work in different ways are still in testing and despite the promising news about Modernas and Pfizers shots, more volunteers are needed for those studies.

Stocks opened higher on the news on Wall Street. Moderna was likely to hit an all-time high. Markets in Asia and Europe were up sharply as well.

Modernas vaccine is being studied in 30,000 volunteers who received either the real thing or a dummy shot. On Sunday, an independent monitoring board examined 95 infections that were recorded after volunteers' second dose, and they discovered all but five illnesses occurred in participants who got the placebo.

The study is continuing, and Moderna acknowledged the protection rate might change as more COVID-19 infections are detected. Also, its too soon to know how long protection lasts. Both cautions apply to Pfizers vaccine as well.

But Modernas independent monitors reported some additional, promising tidbits: All 11 severe COVID-19 cases were among placebo recipients, and there were no significant safety concerns. The main side effects were fatigue, muscle aches and injection-site pain after the second dose.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts, companys vaccine is among 11 candidates in late-stage testing around the world, four of them in huge studies in the U.S.

Both Modernas shots and the Pfizer-BioNTech candidate are so-called mRNA vaccines, a brand-new technology. They arent made with the coronavirus itself, meaning theres no chance anyone could catch it from the shots. Instead, the vaccine contains a piece of genetic code that trains the immune system to recognize the spiked protein on the surface of the virus.

Another steep challenge: distributing doses that must be kept very cold. Both the Moderna and Pfizer shots are frozen but at different temperatures. Moderna said that once thawed, its doses can last longer in a refrigerator than initially thought, up to 30 days. Pfizers shots require long-term storage at ultra-cold temperatures.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla tweeted that that he was thrilled at Modernas news, saying, Our companies share a common goal defeating this dreaded disease.

The Associated Press

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COVID-19 vaccine shows overwhelming success in US tests, appears to be 94.5% effective - OregonLive

AURORA, Colo. (KDVR) UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital is one of 99 sites across the US that is participating in the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine trial.

More than 200 Colorado volunteers are taking part. Dr. Lisa Wynn and her husband are two of them. Dr. Wynn says they were very excited to hear that early data shows a 94.5% efficacy rate.

Im really excited to be a part of it. This pandemic has really changed the way we live, and I hope that having multiple vaccines that are safe and effective will get us back to living a normal life again, Wynn said.

She and her husband received one injection in August, and another four weeks later. They dont know if they received a placebo, or the actual vaccine. They say they are feeling fine, and have not had any side effects.Dr. Wynn is glad they could do their part to help.

My husband and I are both Black, and it was important for us to patriciate in the trial because diversity in healthcare research is extremely important, she said.

Dr. Thomas Campbell agrees. Hes the Chief Clinical Research Officer at UCHealth who is overseeing the trial.

Dr. Campbell says this vaccine is similar to the Pfizer vaccine, and has similar early data.

When you do two experiments, two scientific experiments and get the same answer you have much greater confidence in the results, Campbell said.

He believes more data is needed on long-term effects of the vaccine, but says people should know that these trials were not rushed.

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Hundreds of people from Colorado are participating in the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine trial - FOX 31 Denver

The first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine are expected to reach the Coastal Bend at least by January if not sooner.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas The first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine are expected to reach the coastal bend at least by January if not sooner, but the Deputy Coordinator with Nueces County Emergency Management told county commissioners Monday that it will be limited at first with only 25-thousand immunizations expected for the entire state of Texas.

They require at least 1000 doses per location and that is not very many vaccines, said Kathy Ard-Blattner with the Nueces County Emergency Management.

Front line workers from health care to first responders will be the first in line to receive the vaccine, but with an estimated 70-thousand paramedics in the state alone there won't be enough supply to go around on the first attempt.

Right now, Texas is experiencing another surge and is leading the us in positive cases. El Paso seeing the worst of it.

They have had a 1000 percent increase in less than a month of COVID deaths, said Ard-Blattner.

Nueces County is nowhere near that level, but medical professionals stand at the ready as they begin to watch our local numbers increase saying the number of beds and supply levels are still good.

Nueces bed availability 43, out of 121 adult ICU beds are available, said Ard-Blattner.

The county is scheduled to meet with local, regional and state partners on Tuesday to continue their planning for distribution of the vaccine. At least 50 local providers from doctors, pharmacies, to the health department have applied to receive doses.

We are looking at a lot of the major, CVS and Walgreens to be the ones to vaccinate the long-term care and assisted living, said Ard-Blattner.

The vaccine isn't expected to reach the general public until the middle of 2021. Health leaders are also working on informing folks about the vaccination process saying its not like getting a flu shot.

You have to have a 15-minute hold time once you give the vaccination that you have to watch that person for reactions, said Ard-Blattner. It will also require at least 2 doses.

"So, you give a dose, then you have 21-28 days before the second dose is taken, said Ard-Blattner. They expect distribution plans to be finalized by December.

For the latest updates on coronavirus in the Coastal Bend, click here.

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