First Mass. hospital gets COVID-19 vaccine shipment

BOSTON — It was a shipment that, somehow, shouldn’t have arrived looking so mundane. But there they were: nearly 2,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine in a plain white box from Kalamazoo, Mich. dropped by FedEx at Boston Medical Center early Monday morning.

“We got notice it was coming today,” said the hospital’s Chief Pharmacy Officer David Twitchell. “My understanding was that about 20 hospitals were getting it in the first round.”

That made BMC the first Boston hospital to get the messenger-RNA based vaccine, which Pfizer developed with the German biotechnology firm BioNTech.

Shortly after delivery to BMC, the 1,950 vials were pulled from a shipping bed of dry ice and placed into a refrigerator chilled to minus-71 degrees Celsius, the product’s required storage temperature.

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BMC plans to begin vaccinating front-line employees on Wednesday by appointment, with an emphasis on those who have face-to-face contact with COVID-19 patients. Physicians and nurses on COVID-19 floors fit into that category, but so do food service workers and housekeeping staff.

“We hope to do about 1,000 by the end of day Saturday, if the interest is high enough, people schedule doses and we’re up and running at full capacity,” Twitchell said. “Our next shipment we anticipate as soon as next week. So by the time we get through these initial doses, we should have another 2000 in the door.”

Other hospitals expect to receive doses of the Pfizer vaccine this week, too, including Mass. General, Brigham and Women’s, Tufts New England, and St. Vincent and UMass Memorial hospitals in Worcester.

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