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As pharmacies and hospitals across the country gear up for a COVID-19 vaccine, which once approved could be here by year’s end, one local drug store now has a storage device capable of maintaining it.
Peoples Drug Store, located at 7869 W. Main St. in Houma, now has an Ai Glacier Ultra-low freezer, which is able to store the vaccine at the minus-80 degrees Celsius needed to preserve it.
“[The Pfizer vaccine] is supposed to be the one that first comes out. I wanted to be sure that someone in our area had it [Ai Glacier freezer],” said Susan Brunet, owner and Chief Pharmacist of Peoples Drug Store, which has been approved to dispense the coronavirus vaccine.
Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine, known as BNT162b2, was submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval on Nov. 20. Its trials show that it is 95 percent effective in preventing infections, even in older adults, and caused no serious safety concerns, according to a CNN report.
“It’s [the freezer] 18 cubic feet so it’s pretty big,” Brunet said. “And I know that they’re supposed to give them to us in thousand unit lots. So each time that you get it, it’s going to be a thousand shots. I know it’ll hold more than that.”
BNT162b2 isn’t the only vaccine that shows promise.
Moderna announced it was applying Monday, Nov. 30, to the FDA for authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine. The company said its data shows the vaccine is 94.1 percent effective at preventing Covid-19 and 100 percent effective at preventing severe cases of the disease.
The FDA is scheduled to meet with its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on Dec. 10 and Dec. 17 to review Pfizer’s and Moderna’s applications, respectively, according to reports.
“I know that once it gets approved, within 24 hours it’s going to be flown all over the country,” Brunet said. “I just wanted to be ahead of the game and have this set up.”
Brunet added that the freezer allows the vaccine to be stored without having to keep changing out dry ice — which she believes there might be a shortage of when the vaccine becomes available.
“I contacted the hospital to see if they wanted to use ours as a storage unit. I even called the state and Pfizer to see if they wanted us to be kind of like a distribution center…,” she said. “We’re just trying to do what we can do for the community.”
Who goes to the top of the list to receive any approved vaccine is still being decided.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices will vote on Tuesday to decide who receives vaccine first, according to a report published today by The Independent.
Pfizer officials have expressed vaccine is set to be distributed to health care workers on the front lines and individuals with a high risk for severe disease. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told “Good Morning America” in mid-November that he hopes “the ordinary citizen” should be able to get a vaccine by April, May or June of next year.
When the vaccine becomes widely available, many health officials have said, it’s up to a significant amount of the population to actually take it for it to have a great impact and bring things back to normal.
“A lot of people are still scared of the flu vaccine, so a lot of people die every year because people won’t take the flu vaccine,” Brunet noted. “The more people that you can get to take the vaccine, then the less likelihood of those people being the spreaders.”
“If the public is receptive to getting the vaccine, then I think it’ll make a big difference,” she said.
