The first shots were given in the American mass vaccination campaign on Monday, opening a new chapter in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more people in the United States — over 300,000 — than in any other country and has taken a particularly devastating toll on people of color.
Shortly after 9 a.m., the new Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was administered at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, the first known inoculation since the vaccine was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration late last week. It was a hopeful step for New York State, which the virus has scarred profoundly, leaving more than 35,000 people dead and severely weakening the economy.
“I believe this is the weapon that will end the war,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Monday morning, shortly before the shot was given to Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse and the director of patient services in the intensive care unit at the center. State officials said the shot was the first to be given outside of a vaccine trial in the United States.
Ms. Lindsay, who has treated patients throughout the pandemic, said that she hoped her public vaccination would instill confidence that the shots were safe.
“I have seen the alternative, and do not want it for you,” she said. “I feel like healing is coming. I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history.”
President Trump posted on Twitter: “First Vaccine Administered. Congratulations USA! Congratulations WORLD!”
Shortly afterward, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said at a news conference: “To me, we were watching an incredibly historic moment, and the beginning of something much better for this city and this country.”
In Iowa City, Iowa, David Conway, a 39-year-old emergency room nurse, received the vaccine, and in Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Mark Conroy, 41, an emergency medicine physician, did, too.
“It was pure excitement on my part,” said Dr. Conroy, the medical director of the emergency department at Ohio State University Hospital, who added that he had lost friends to the virus.
The vaccinations started after the F.D.A.’s emergency authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Friday night, and as the U.S. coronavirus death toll surpassed another dire milestone on Monday, with a steady surge in new cases daily.
On Sunday, trucks and cargo planes packed with the first of nearly three million doses of coronavirus vaccine had fanned out across the country, as hospitals in all 50 states rushed to set up injection sites and their anxious workers tracked each shipment hour by hour. But the rollout is less centralized in the United States than in other countries that are racing to distribute it.
Across the country, according to Gen. Gustave F. Perna, the chief operating officer of the federal effort to develop a vaccine, 145 sites were set to receive the vaccine on Monday, 425 on Tuesday and 66 on Wednesday.
A majority of the first injections given on Monday are expected to go to high-risk health care workers. In many cases, this first, limited delivery would not supply nearly enough doses to inoculate all of the doctors, nurses, security guards, receptionists and other workers who risk being exposed to the virus every day. Because the vaccines can cause side effects including fevers and aches, hospitals say they will stagger vaccination schedules among workers.
Residents of nursing homes, who have suffered a disproportionate share of Covid-19 deaths, are also being prioritized and are expected to begin receiving vaccinations next week. But the vast majority of Americans will not be eligible for the vaccine until the spring or later.
In an interview with MSNBC on Monday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, laid out a timeline for a return to normalcy that stretched well into 2021. He stressed that until then, social distancing and masks will remain crucial in the fight to stop the spread of the virus.
He predicted that the average person with no underlying conditions would get the vaccine by the end of March or beginning of April. If the campaign is efficient and effective in convincing people to get the vaccine, most people could be vaccinated by late spring or early summer, he said.
“I believe we can get there by then so that by the time we get into the fall, we can start approaching some degree of relief, where the level of infection will be so low in society we can start essentially approaching some form of normality,” he said.
Until then, he stressed, the standard public health measures — distancing, masks, avoiding indoor gatherings — remain necessary.
“A vaccine right now is not a substitute for the normal standard public health measures,” he said, adding, “Only when you get the level of infection in society so low that it’s no longer a public health threat, can you then think about the possibility of pulling back on public health measures.”
On “CBS This Morning,” Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser for the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccine program, called Monday an “amazing day,” and an “extraordinary achievement” by thousands of people involved in developing and distributing the vaccine.
Asked about his biggest worries during the start of the mammoth logistical effort, he noted that accidental loss of temperature control was a concern. (The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine must be kept in ultracold temperatures.)
But he said that his biggest concern “is the level of hesitancy in the country” from those who are skeptical or unwilling to take the vaccine.
The Trump administration is rushing to roll out a $250 million public education campaign to boost confidence in the vaccine. The rollout was delayed for weeks because of concerns that the campaign had become politicized.
The vaccinations in the United States come six days after Britain became the first nation in the world to begin rolling out a fully tested vaccine. Since then, a handful of other nations have approved the same vaccine. In Canada, the first shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrived on Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Twitter, and the first shots could be given as early as Monday. Among the first to receive the vaccine will be residents of nursing homes in Quebec and frontline health workers in Toronto.
Monday marked a turning point after so many months of misery for frontline health care workers as they began to receive the first clinically authorized vaccinations as part of America’s mass vaccination campaign.
“I’m so ecstatic,” said Angela Mattingly, a housekeeper at the University of Iowa Hospital, in Iowa City, who has been cleaning the rooms of people with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. “This is the marking of getting back to normal.”
On Monday morning, Ms. Mattingly was fifth in line as shots were dispensed. She was told to wait for 15 minutes in case she had an adverse reaction, and then she headed back downstairs to finish her shift.
Many Americans breathed a sigh of relief as TV screens that for so long recounted the rising toll were filled with images of supply trucks fanning out and doses being administered. For those who work in the health care industry, it was a pleasant turn in what has been a devastating year.
The moment was heavy for Mona Moghareh, a 30-year-old pharmacist, on Monday morning as she administered the first shots at the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans.
“We have been waiting for this,” she said, as journalists and state officials looked on. “This is really for all of those patients that unfortunately didn’t make it, all those patients still coming through the doors.”
In Ohio, pharmacists were greeted with cheering and applause as they carried in doses for about 30 physicians at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.
Dr. Mark Conroy, 41, the medical director of the Ohio State University Hospital emergency department, was one of the first to receive the vaccine.
“It’s been a long 10 months of work and protecting ourselves and protecting our patients, and so to have the opportunity to be a little bit safer going forward means a lot to me,” said Dr. Conroy, who said he had been anxious about the prospect of bringing the virus home to his family.
He added that he would continue to wear a mask and practice social distancing.
“We still are learning a lot about how this vaccine works and how people respond to it,” he said, “so I certainly don’t want to take any chances and see myself get sick.”
In Kentucky, Dr. Jason Smith, the chief medical officer at University of Louisville Health, was the first person in the state to receive the vaccine.
“Didn’t even feel it,’’ Dr. Smith said, laughing as a health care worker applied a smiley face Band-Aid to his arm.
The number of people with the coronavirus in the United States who have died passed 300,000 on Monday, another wrenching record that comes less than four weeks after the nation’s virus deaths reached a quarter-million.
Covid-19 surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield said in public remarks last week, referring to a breakdown of deaths for a week in early December. Almost the same number of Americans are being lost to the disease each day as were killed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks or the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The surge in deaths reflects how much faster Americans have spread the virus to one another since late September, when the number of cases identified daily had fallen to below 40,000. A range of factors — including financial pressure to return to workplaces, the politicization of mask-wearing and a collective surrender to the desire for social contact — has since driven new cases to more than 200,000 per day. Preventable deaths on a staggering scale, many experts said, were sure to follow.
“There’s no need for that many to have died,” said David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We chose, as a country, to take our foot off the gas pedal. We chose to, and that’s the tragedy.’’
Three hundred thousand is more than the number of Americans who died fighting in World War II. It is roughly half the number of total cancer deaths expected this year. It is the population of Pittsburgh.
But the worst is yet to come.
The first 100,000 U.S. deaths were confirmed by May 27; it then took four months for the nation to log another 100,000 deaths. The latest 100,000 deaths occurred over a span of about three months. The next 100,000 Americans to die, many public health experts believe, may do so in closer to one month.
“I am floored at how much worse it is than what I expected,” said Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.
The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a highly effective vaccine last week offers a new tool to slow — or even stop — the virus’s onslaught if it becomes widely distributed early next year. But “the people who are going to die in late December and early January will already have been infected by then,” Dr. Jha said. “It’s going to be very hard to avoid hitting 400,000 within a month after hitting 300,000.”
The proportion of Americans who die roughly 22 days after being diagnosed with the coronavirus has remained at about 1.7 percent since May, Trevor Bedford, a genomic epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle, noted recently on Twitter. As a result, about three weeks worth of future deaths are “essentially ‘baked into’ currently reported cases,” Dr. Bedford wrote.
Since the number of reported cases has approached an average of 200,000 per day over the last 22 days, an average of more than 3,000 deaths are likely occur daily for the next 22, according to Dr. Bedford’s back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Many of the 300,000 who died from had an underlying health condition, like diabetes, hypertension or obesity. A large fraction were residents of long-term care facilities. About a third were over the age of 85.
But it is wrong to conclude that these were deaths that would have happened anyway, epidemiologists said. Nationwide, deaths have been almost 20 percent higher than normal since mid-March, when the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.
Roughly 60,000 of the 300,000 were under the age of 65. A disproportionate number were Black, Latino and Native American — with the highest disparities at younger ages: Black Americans from ages 30 to 49 died at nearly six times the rate of white people in the same age group, while Hispanic people died at nearly seven time the rate of white people in the same age group, according to an analysis by Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist.
Will the coronavirus death toll exceed 400,000? Much will depend on whether a majority of Americans chooses to take the vaccine, experts said. Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts who has been assembling statistical projections of Covid-19 deaths from researchers around the country said many of the models have performed poorly during the recent climb in cases, in part because human behavior was so variable.
“Actions taken collectively can really change the course of what is happening,” Dr. Reich said. “One reason this is hard to predict is to some extent the power is in our hands.”
Mary Smith heard the news that a coronavirus vaccine was being administered to Americans for the first time outside clinical trials. It had not come soon enough for her husband, Mike, who died from the virus at age 46 in November after rapidly becoming fatigued, short of breath and feverish.
“It was so close,” Ms. Smith said. “It was so close.”
Ms. Smith, who lives outside Peoria, Ill., also contracted the virus, but her case was mild and felt more like a sinus infection, she said. His case sent him to the hospital three times, where he was eventually placed on a ventilator and died within days.
Mr. Smith was only a year or two away from retiring from his work at Caterpillar, a manufacturer of construction equipment. The couple had planned to use the extra time to visit their five grandchildren, who were “the love of his life,” Ms. Smith said.
Ms. Smith has endured comments from skeptics who have said they don’t trust the vaccine.
“These people who say, ‘I’m not getting it’ — all I can say is, ‘Why? Have you lost your mind?’” she said. “Have you not seen how many people have died? This is real.”
The news of people receiving the vaccine was also bittersweet for Petrice Brown of Charleston, S.C., whose husband, Keith, was an emergency medical technician. He died from the virus in September.
“He would have been first in line,” Ms. Brown said. “And you know why? Because he would have done whatever he could do to not get the virus, so he could continue to work. He filled in if people were sick.”
She said she was relieved to have work as a distraction from all the media attention to the vaccine’s arrival.
“It’s hard, because when it comes on the news, I think, ‘That could have been Keith getting the vaccine,’” she said. “It wasn’t years too late, it was months. It could have saved not just my husband’s life, but a lot of lives.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday advised clinicians to reassure their patients of the safety of Covid-19 vaccines.
“Safety standards for vaccines are high,” Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, the agency’s vaccine safety team lead, said on a conference call with clinicians.
But trials “may not detect all types of adverse events, especially ones that are rare or take longer to occur,” Dr. Shimabukuro added, reiterating the importance of continuing to monitor vaccinated people for any rare or unexpected side effects.
On Friday, a vaccine manufactured by pharmaceutical company Pfizer became the first to receive an emergency green light from the Food and Drug Administration. The first shots of the vaccine were administered on Monday to health workers in several states.
A vaccine very similar to the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, made by a competitor, Moderna, is expected to receive emergency clearance by week’s end.
But neither vaccine is fully approved or licensed. Although panels of experts have deemed the vaccines both safe and effective, more data must be collected before the products can receive an official stamp of approval from the F.D.A.
Part of that process will involve keeping close tabs on people who receive the vaccines in the coming months. Some side effects are so rare that they may not appear until hundreds of thousands of people get the vaccine. And certain groups of people, including young children and pregnant women, have not been rigorously studied in vaccine trials. But the government has noted that women who are pregnant or breast feeding can still opt to get the vaccine, and people as young as 16 were included in the F.D.A.’s authorization for emergency use.
Dr. Shimabukuro encouraged clinicians to report all “clinically important or medically significant adverse events following vaccination, even if it’s not clear if the vaccination caused the adverse event.”
To ease the process, the C.D.C. is rolling out a smartphone app called v-safe, which will use texts and web surveys to check in with vaccine recipients in the weeks and months after they get their shots.
Based on data gathered from months of clinical trials, people receiving vaccines like Pfizer’s might expect to experience mild symptoms like fevers, fatigue, headaches and chills that clear up within a couple days. Anything more anomalous or prolonged should prompt a conversation with a health care provider.
IOWA CITY — For Dr. Patricia Winokur, receiving the vaccine on Monday was in part thanks to her own work. She is a principal investigator on a clinical trial of the Pfizer vaccine, which is the first being rolled out across the United States.
“This is the culmination of a lot of hard work,” she said while tearing up.
The trial that Dr. Winokur, 61, helped run started in July and ran through October at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, with 270 volunteers. Some had tested positive for the coronavirus, but others had not; they received the vaccine to study the body’s response.
No one in the trial suffered severe reactions, she said, but there were side effects similar to vaccines for the flu, including fatigue, headache and body aches.
One unusual side effect the volunteers reported: pronounced back pain. But most people tolerated the vaccine, and the adverse symptoms went away after a few days, Dr. Winokur said.
Members of the study will receive regular follow-ups for the next two years to determine if they have any lasting adverse reactions, and how long the vaccine remains effective against contracting Covid-19.
“I am so proud to have been a part of it,” Dr. Winokur said.
Global Roundup
The New Zealand government intends to establish a travel bubble with Australia in the first quarter of next year, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday.
The arrangement would allow people to travel freely between Australia and New Zealand without needing to quarantine for two weeks on arrival. Passengers arriving from New Zealand are already exempt from quarantine requirements in Australia.
The travel bubble was “pending confirmation” from Australian officials, Ms. Ardern said during a news conference, and would be contingent on “no significant changes in the circumstances of either country.”
New Zealand, population about five million, has managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic, with 2,096 cases and 25 lives lost, according to a New York Times database. In Australia, which has a population of about 25.5 million, 28,031 people have tested positive for the coronavirus, while 908 have died.
The governments of New Zealand and Australia announced in May that they had reached a formal agreement to form a travel bubble as soon as it was safe to do so. But surges in new cases, most notably in Victoria, Australia, left the plans suspended.
Here’s what else to know in coronavirus news from around the world:
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Officials in South Korea have ordered schools in the Seoul metropolitan area to move all classes online starting Tuesday until at least the end of the year. Additional measures may be announced this week as the country struggles to contain its worst outbreak yet. South Korea, which has a population of about 50 million, reported 718 new cases on Monday, down from a record 1,030 the day before.
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Japan is also struggling with an uptick in coronavirus cases and will hit pause on a nationwide campaign to encourage travel and tourism. With hospitals under increasing pressure from a recent, steady growth in new infections, the program, called “Go To Travel,” will be halted from Dec. 28 through at least Jan. 11, covering the most important holiday of the calendar, New Year’s, when many people travel home. The program had provided substantial discounts to consumers to encourage them to support the country’s beleaguered tourism and service sectors.
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The Netherlands will lock down for at least five weeks to limit the spread of the virus, Mark Rutte, the prime minister, announced in a national address. The measures include the closure of schools, gyms, non-essential businesses, theaters and more until January 19. Medical offices will be allowed to stay open.
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Singapore on Monday became the first Asian country to approve a coronavirus vaccine made by the American drug maker Pfizer, announcing that the first shipment would arrive this month and be given free to Singaporeans and long-term residents. Singapore has also agreed to buy vaccines from the American drug maker Moderna and the Chinese company Sinovac. “If all goes according to plan, we will have enough vaccines for everyone in Singapore by the third quarter of 2021,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an address to the nation.
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Officials in Germany urged the public to not rush to stores to finish their Christmas shopping this week, as all but those selling essential goods prepared to close on Wednesday amid a heightened lockdown. Germany announced the stricter measures on Sunday after weeks of a partial lockdown that kept both schools and shops open but failed to adequately tackle the surging numbers of new coronavirus cases.
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Austria wrapped up its first nationwide mass coronavirus testing on Sunday, turning up about 4,200 apparently symptomless infections. Slightly less than a quarter of the country’s population took part in the free screening, available to anyone more than 6 years old who had not been sick in the past three months. Rudi Anschober, the Austrian health minister, called it “not just a good start, but a successful step in containing the pandemic in Austria.”
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The European Union launched a mobile app on Monday aimed at facilitating safe travel between its 27 member countries, as well as to Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, which belong to the bloc’s Schengen zone. The app, called Re-open EU, is intended to help residents of Europe navigate a patchwork of different national restrictions, as well as quarantine and testing requirements, and was introduced ahead of the busy holiday season.
Jennifer Jett, Ben Dooley and Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting.
From a hospital housekeeper to a chief medical doctor, here are some of the people who were first (or close to first) to receive a Covid-19 vaccination at hospitals across the country on Monday.
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Dr. Christian Arbelaez, an emergency room physician, at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, R.I., in a state that’s been hit especially hard in recent weeks. He breathed a deep sigh of relief, thanked the person who administered the dose and received a green sticker that said “COVID-19 vaccine” with a black check mark.
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Second in line there was Fernando M. Pire, 60, who works in housekeeping in the emergency room and has been at Rhode Island Hospital for 24 years. He volunteered to be among the first because he has asthma and diabetes, but he said having the news media watching made him nervous: “I’ve never been on camera before.”
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Dr. Patricia Winokur, 61, a professor at the University of Iowa and a principal investigator on the clinical trial for the vaccine. “This is the culmination of a lot hard work,” she said. “Our team has worked hard, and I am so proud to have been a part of it.’’
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Leon Haley Jr., chief executive of UF Health in Jacksonville, Fla. Not a frontline medical worker himself, he said it was important to show his employees that he believed in the safety of the vaccine.
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The director of emergency services at UF Health, David Meysenburg, 45, a nurse who went back to work after getting his shot. Though he does not work directly with Covid-19 patients, he said, he manages nurses who do and wanted to set an example.
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Vanessa Arroyo, 31, a nurse in the Covid-19 unit at Tampa General Hospital. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was on hand to cheer her on.
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Dr. Jason Smith, chief medical officer at the U of L Health in Louisville. “Didn’t even feel it,” he said.
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Charmaine Pykosh, 67, an advanced nurse practitioner at the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. She was chosen by a vote of her colleagues.
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Teresa Mata, 51, who cleans rooms in the emergency department at Methodist Dallas Medical Center. She cheered and raised her hands after getting the shot, and said she wanted her fellow Spanish speakers in Texas to be sure to get vaccinated.
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Sandra Lindsay, an intensive care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, believed to be the first recipient anywhere in the country outside a clinical trial. “I feel like healing is coming,” she said. “I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history.’’
Just a few hours after the first Covid-19 vaccine was administered in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned that the state could be subject to sweeping shutdowns if hospitalizations continued to increase.
“If we do not change the trajectory, we could very well be headed to shutdown,” said Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat. “A shutdown is something to worry about.”
The grim notice, on the same day as the vaccine’s much-anticipated rollout in the United States, was a somber reminder of the coronavirus’s resurgence in New York, where tens of thousands more people are expected to be infected until the vaccine is widely available next year.
Mr. Cuomo did impose new restrictions — ranging from limiting capacity at houses of worship to 50 percent to limiting restaurant dining to four people per table — in certain parts of upstate New York.
Those new restrictions were limited to parts of Batavia, Genesee, Niagara, Oneida, Rome and Utica Counties after each of those areas met certain hospitalization and positivity rate to trigger a “yellow zone” under the state’s plan.
Mr. Cuomo again warned that hospitals could become overwhelmed and New York City, where he recently barred indoor dining, could see a broader shutdown, a so-called red zone, come January “if nothing changes.” At the current rate, he said, the number of Covid-19 patients in hospitals could double to 11,000 in one month, and an additional 3,500 people could die from the disease.
The governor’s forewarning of economically-detrimental shutdowns of nonessential businesses is part of a recent shift in his rhetoric, now increasingly focused on deaths and hospitalizations, to coax New Yorkers into changing their behavior to curb the spread.
Specifically, Mr. Cuomo has been warning of a worsening forecast as people gather for the holidays and he has urged residents against convening in groups at homes, where he says “living room spread” is leading to a sharp increase in cases.
“The problem in the spring was going out,” he said. “The problem in the winter is staying home and inviting people over. That is what we’re dealing with in the holiday season.”
Even though he was optimistic about vaccinations, Mayor Bill de Blasio also warned that the city still had difficult weeks and months ahead as it endures a second wave of the virus, and advised New Yorkers to prepare for the possibility of a shutdown.
“We need to recognize that that may be coming,” he said. “And we’ve got to get ready for that now.”
There has never been a Monday quite like this one — an unmistakable, if unpredictable, coinciding pivot for the presidency and a pandemic that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans.
State by state, the typically unobserved clockworks of American democracy began to click into place as electors ratified the victory of the 46th president of the United States, Joseph R. Biden Jr., despite attempts by the 45th president to subvert the results by strong-arming local Republicans to overturn the will of voters.
Around 10 a.m. Eastern, electors in Indiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Vermont had gathered for the formal process of affirming Mr. Biden’s clear national victory. There was no doubt about the outcome — despite President Trump’s efforts to encourage the belief that there was — and the president-elect was expected to pass the necessary threshold by early evening.
In a sign of a new abnormal ushered in by Mr. Trump’s behavior, electors in some states have had to deliberate in tight security, sometimes in out-of-the-way locations, after they have been threatened for simply doing their constitutional duty.
At the same time, other machinery — more industrial than ceremonial — was set into motion as the first batches of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, which left a plant in Michigan Sunday evening to the cheering of onlookers, began arriving in virus-ravaged cities around the country.
Federal officials said 145 sites were set to receive the vaccine on Monday, 425 on Tuesday and 66 on Wednesday. A majority of the first injections are expected to be given to high-risk health care workers on Monday, although the relatively small amount of vaccine delivered will fall short of offering protection to all those who are eligible to get it.
But it could signal the beginning of the end.
On Monday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who will continue on as a central federal architect of the virus response under Mr. Biden, said he believed most Americans who wanted the vaccine could probably get it by later March or early April.
In an interview with MSNBC, Dr. Fauci said that plans to vaccinate Mr. Biden were “under discussion” amid reports that White House officials had planned to vaccinate top-level Trump administration officials.
Mr. Trump, whose efforts to downplay the severity of the pandemic were a focus of the election, began the day, as he often does lately, posting a tweet laden with falsehoods about the “Rigged Election.” The message was flagged by Twitter.
Yet, the president, who remains eager to take credit for the unprecedented scientific effort to rush the development of the vaccine, could not deny himself a victory lap on the day his political defeat was to become formal.
“First Vaccine Administered. Congratulations USA! Congratulations WORLD!” he wrote.
PITTSBURGH — For all it portended as the end of a year of misery and death, the operation was stunningly mundane. A little trickle of blood here or there, followed by small talk and cotton swabs, and Pittsburgh’s first Covid-19 vaccinations outside of clinical trials had been administered.
The recipients at the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh were frontline health care workers from four different hospitals around the city, ranging in age from 29 to 67: a nurse practitioner, an emergency physician, an intensive care unit nurse, a transporter, an environment services supervisor.
Some of them spoke at a news conference about the thinking and procedures that led to them being the first recipients in the city — and certainly the highest-profile ones.
“African-Americans have suffered quite the repercussions of Covid-19,” said Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, 42, an emergency physician, who is Black. “I wanted to share with my community that it is OK, that this vaccine is the thing to do to keep us safe to keep us healthy and to keep us alive. And I wanted to set that example, not only for my family, but for my community as well.”
Tami Minnier, a nurse and the chief quality officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, compared the moment to the introduction of the polio vaccine: “Over 65 years ago, on April 12 of 1955,” she said, “Dr. Jonas Salk took some of these very same steps. And we all know the benefit that humanity has seen from that.” Dr. Salk was a University of Pittsburgh researcher.
The hospital received 975 doses of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday, hospital officials said, and would be giving the necessary second round of shots to the recipients in two weeks’ time.
Dr. Graham Snyder, medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology, said he thought the UPMC system’s entire work force — there are about 60,000 frontline health care workers in the network — could be vaccinated “within a couple months.”
FARGO, N.D. — Tim Ostgarden was working on the hospital loading dock early Monday morning when a FedEx truck pulled up bearing just one package: a bulky white box slapped with PRIORITY labels that had been trucked and flown from a vaccine plant in Michigan to a shipping hub in Memphis before landing at the medical center in downtown Fargo, where Mr. Ostgarden handles incoming packages.
“History, is what it is,” he said, looking at the box.
Inside, buried under a bed of dry ice, were three trays containing nearly 3,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, one of a cascade of thousands of vaccine shipments that began landing at hospitals and health departments across the United States on Monday.
All weekend, pharmacists and other staff from the Sanford Health hospitals here in North Dakota, a state devastated by the virus, had been checking their emails and following a FedEx tracking number as they watched the first vaccines course across the country. At precisely 7:02 a.m. on Monday, their first shipment arrived.
The first vaccinations are set to start here on Monday afternoon, and are being doled out to high-risk doctors, nurses and others who work directly with Covid-19 patients and face the highest risks of exposure to the virus that has killed 1,158 people across this lightly populated state on the northern plains.
Before that could start, the hospital’s pharmacy staff had to unpack the vaccines and move them into an ultracold freezer — a delicate, timed dance that needed to happen in under five minutes to ensure the vaccine would stay at the low temperatures needed to ensure its effectiveness.
Monte Roemmich, the hospital’s pharmacy manager, pried open the box and checked a temperature sensor to ensure that the vaccine had stayed sufficiently chilly on its daylong journey from the Pfizer plant in western Michigan to North Dakota. Everything looked good.
He slipped on a pair of thick blue cold-resistant gloves and, one by one, scooted the trays into a new freezer that will keep the vaccines at some 94 degrees below zero until they are ready for use. Hospital workers have already been signing up for vaccination slots over the next several days.
As deaths eclipsed 300,000 nationwide, many hospitals do not yet have enough vials of Pfizer’s vaccine to inoculate all their workers, to say nothing of vulnerable patients or the general public. Still, the few pharmacy workers clapped as Mr. Roemmich slid the just-delivered vaccines into the freezer.
“It’s even better than Christmas,” said David Leedhal, the director of pharmacy.
Colleges have been hot spots for spreading the coronavirus since students returned to campus this fall. Now, with universities and their health care centers playing a crucial role in distributing the vaccine, many are relishing a chance to redeem themselves.
“The Covid-19 vaccine is about to be here,” crowed an email sent early Monday morning to students, faculty and staff of the University of Florida, calling it “a true testament to the power of science.”
The email announced that the university’s medical system in Jacksonville would be among the first in the country to receive doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Ten thousand doses arrived on Monday, with another 10,000 expected on Tuesday, said Dr. Leon L. Haley Jr., chief executive officer of UF Health Jacksonville and dean of the College of Medicine.
He expects more doses of both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines to follow in the coming weeks.
American universities have been the source of significant coronavirus spread, with more than 397,000 cases since the pandemic began, according to New York Times tracking data. And deaths in communities that are home to colleges have risen faster than in the rest of the nation.
But now universities across the country are poised to be major distribution centers of the vaccine, bringing a sense of normalcy back to campuses and society. The University of Iowa Hospital, which conducted a clinical trial of the Pfizer vaccine, was among the first places in the country to receive and administer it on Monday morning; the first dose was injected into the arm of David Conway, 39, an emergency-room nurse.
The University of Kentucky health system was expecting 1,950 doses to be delivered on Tuesday, and planned to begin vaccinating more than 9,000 health care workers, starting with emergency departments at UK Chandler Hospital and UK Good Samaritan Hospital, as well as the Covid unit at UK Chandler. The system now has about 90 patients infected with the coronavirus, including about 25 in intensive care.
Distribution of the vaccine to universities depended to some degree on their ability to store it at subfreezing temperatures. The University of Kentucky purchased four negative-80-degree freezers to store the vaccine when it is available for faculty and students on campus, as well as the wider community.
“We want to be prepared for broader distribution whenever that is announced,” said Jay Blanton, a university spokesman; officials predicted that would probably not be until spring or summer.
Likewise, the University of Florida will be rolling out vaccines for frontline health care workers first, sharing its shipment with other Jacksonville hospitals, Dr. Haley said.
“The state’s going to help us be real aggressive about taking care of health care workers across the next couple of weeks,” he said. “After that, we can roll it out to faculty and students. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, depending on what we start to get, that we may get to the general public as early as January.”
Less than a week after Britain began to introduce the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus shot — becoming the first nation in the world to administer a fully tested vaccine to the public — primary care doctors in England will begin offering doses to their patients.
Beginning on Monday, the shots will be delivered to more than 100 vaccination centers in villages, towns and cities by groups of doctors, the National Health Service said. The injections will still be prioritized, with the staff and residents of nursing homes and those aged 80 and over among the first in line as the country expands its program.
The physicians, known in Britain as general practitioners, face an “enormous challenge” to implement the mass vaccination program while also offering their usual services for patients, Prof. Martin Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said in a statement.
But the primary care doctors take a major role in administering other vaccines, such as those for seasonal flu, and Professor Marshall said, “We want to use this experience to help protect people from Covid-19 and start getting life back to normal again.”
Tens of thousands of vaccinations have already been given since the campaign began last Tuesday in hospitals around Britain. But the country received an initial batch of just 800,000 doses — or enough to vaccinate 400,000 people, because each person requires two doses — and it is still unclear when more will become available. Britain has a population of about 66 million.
Vaccinations will also begin in nursing homes later this week, the health service said, after stringent policies around the delivery of the doses were finalized. More doctors and pharmacies in the country will join the program “on a phased basis” over the next few months, the health service added, urging patients not to request the vaccine because doctors would directly contact those in priority groups to offer them the shot.
The vaccine program comes as cases continue to surge in Britain, with 18,447 new infections reported on Sunday and 144 deaths according to a Times database. The nation has reported about 1.8 million total cases and some 64,000 deaths since the pandemic began.
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