UMass Memorial, Saint Vincent planning for coronavirus vaccine by next week

A large hospital building in an urban setting

Photo | Grant Welker Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester

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By Grant Welker

The leaders of UMass Memorial Health Care and Saint Vincent Hospital said Tuesday they expect to be able to begin to provide coronavirus vaccines to their healthcare workers next week.

UMass Memorial could begin to deliver doses around Dec. 17, said Dr. Eric Dickson, the president and CEO of the Worcester health system.

"We're very excited about the vaccine," Dickson said in a Worcester Business Journal online health care forum.

Carolyn Jackson, the CEO of Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, said the hospital expects to receive Pfizer's vaccination early next week with the ability to start to use it days later with its healthcare workers. Already, Saint Vincent has set up a room to conduct the vaccinations and set up lines on the floor to show where people should distance while waiting in line.

“The good news is, we do vaccines all the time," Jackson said.

Pfizer said in early November its vaccine, which it is developing with German firm BioNTech, is 95% effective. Pfizer said it expects to produce up to 50 million vaccine doses this year and up to 1.3 billion in 2021, with two doses required per person a few weeks apart.

Gov. Charlie Baker said in early December vaccines could begin arriving in Massachusetts this month, but it will be months before members of the general public have access to immunizations, the State House News Service reported.

Healthcare workers have been in harm's way since the beginning of the pandemic. UMass Memorial has had 534 employees test positive since the pandemic began. The system had 123 employees unable to work because of positive cases or related precautions, according to UMass Memorial data early last week.

More than 1,000 healthcare workers died from the pandemic as of late August, according to a project by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian.