‘This is a day of hope,’ First doses of COVID-19 vaccine arrive in Springfield

SPRINGFIELD — Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine attended as the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine arrived at Mercy Health in Springfield this morning.

The shipment arrived at the hospital shortly before 10 a.m.

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“This is a day of hope,” DeWine said.

Mercy Health said it plans to begin vaccinating employees at around 1 p.m. with about 100 doses being given in the first day. Beginning tomorrow, they plan to give 300 vaccinations per day and should be able to administer all 975 doses within four days.

Employees who want to take the vaccine have opted in during a process that opened through Mercy Health’s human resources department in about 48 hours ago.

The hospital network is one of the 10 pre-positioned sites the state has selected to get the first rounds of the vaccine, which they will be receiving from the Ohio Department of Health early this week.

DeWine said he hopes the vaccine will help avoid tragedies like the death of Tawauna Averette, a registered nurse at Kettering Medical Center who died from COVID-19 complications.

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The Pfizer vaccine, which is a two-shot vaccine, will be given to some of the staff, but according to Mercy Health, the vaccine will not be mandatory for their employees.

Mercy Health will not be responsible for shipping them to other health providers in the area, according to Chris Howe, Vice President of Operations at Mercy Health Springfield.

“For those sites that are signed up essentially as an enrolled provider, they will receive their vaccines directly using the same methodology. It will come from the (Ohio) Department of Health, essentially, and those’ll be distributed to those individuals -- those individual locations based on their size and the number of associates. We will not be responsible for deploying what we receive to any outside entities,” said Howe.

Mercy Health has also ordered special freezers to be able to meet the -94 degrees Fahrenheit requirement for the Pfizer vaccine.

Considering this is such a huge step for the state and everybody involved, Adam Groshans, Market President of Mercy Health, believes there will be a learning curve, but they remain optimistic.

“Maybe the beauty of it is there have been learning curves maybe not exactly like this, but in similar respects, even some of the drills that we’ve done, disaster planning going back to the H1N1 or even the Ebola days, or even the mass disaster type casualty drills that were done after 9/11,” said Groshans. “So there have been shared learnings at multiple steps. Maybe they weren’t called COVID, but there were learnings that we can glean from each of those that have certainly prepared us better for this exercise in this operation”

Cox Media Group