Bladen County hospital among first to get COVID-19 vaccine shipments

BLADEN COUNTY, NC (WTVD) — 11 North Carolina hospital sites, including one in the Cape Fear, will get early shipments of the much-anticipated Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

Last week, Gov. Roy Cooper said the state is expecting nearly 85,000 doses in the first shipment of the vaccine, which requires extra cold storage.

“We’re a big state with rural areas that stretch for hundreds of miles,” he said. “Every person is important, and we’ll work hard to overcome challenges that our geography presents.”

At 148 pages long, North Carolina’s Vaccination Plan is full of details that spell out how the distribution is going to work.

The distribution will be broken down into four phases:

• Phase 1A: Healthcare workers and medical first responders who face a high risk of exposure to the virus. Staff in long-term care settings are also included in this priority group. (Est. population: 140K-161K people)
• Phase 1B: Residents in long-term care settings, people with two or more chronic illnesses, also known as comorbidities, who live inside and outside of congregate living settings such as jails, prisons, and migrant camps — including residents of such locations who are over the age of 65, front line workers with two or more comorbidities, and staff in congregate living settings. (Est. population: 587K-790K people)
• Phase 2: All other residents in congregate living facilities, firefighters and police officers, food packaging, preparation, and processing workers, manufacturing workers, construction workers, transportation workers, some retail and grocery store workers, child care workers, adults with chronic conditions, people over the age of 65, and staff in K-12 schools and colleges/universities. (Est. population: 1.18M-1.57M people)
• Phase 3: Energy/telecom workers, water/waste/energy operators, all other retail workers, religious leaders and other membership associations, students in K-12 and colleges/universities (Est. population: 574K-767K people)
• Phase 4: Everyone else not identified in Phases 1-3 (Est. population: 3.6M-4M people)

Cooper said the state expects to get the Pfizer version of the vaccine, because “Pfizer was the first to see authorizations. So we think that is what would be available and approved first.”

NCDHHS said the sites that will get the first shipment include:

• Bladen Healthcare LLC (Bladen County Hospital)
• Caldwell Memorial Hospital
• CarolinaEast Medical Center
• Catawba Valley Medical Center
• Cumberland County Hospital System Inc (Cape Fear Valley Health System)
• Duke University Health System
• Henderson County Hospital Corporation (Margaret R. Pardee Memorial Hospital)
• Hoke Healthcare LLC (Hoke Hospital)
• The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority (CMC Enterprise)
• University of North Carolina Shared Services Agreement
• Wake Forest Baptist Health

Officials said these facilities have the “greatest capacity for ultra-cold storage.”