Covid 19 coronavirus: first Pfizer injections for vaccinators today

By RNZ

Nine days before a year from the country’s first confirmed case, the first Covid-19 vaccine will be administered in New Zealand today.

The first people vaccinated will not be the border workers or their families, but the vaccinators, the people with the important task of administering the vaccines.

The government says they have spent months planning the logistics of transporting and distributing the vaccines. The first here, and the only Medsafe approved so far, is the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which requires constant storage at -70 ° C.

Dr. Joe Bourne, part of the Covid Vaccine Immunization Program, said that with training and general trials now complete, they were ready for launch.

“We have had a series of tests that have looked at a different part of the process. That has gone from one extreme to another: from receiving the vaccine in the country, storing it, distributing it and taking it to a vaccination center.”

He said that the implementation of vaccination here would be very different than in other countries where Covid-19 was widespread and governments wanted to vaccinate their populations as quickly as possible.

“When people see the numbers that are vaccinated on a daily basis at the beginning of this program, those numbers will be considerably smaller than what we see abroad. That’s because our context is so different.”

The vaccinators had what they call a “dry test” on Wednesday in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Part of the training included what to do when things go wrong, for example, what happens if someone drops a box of vaccines. What happens if someone who is sick comes in?

Bourne said it made sense for vaccinators to be first in line.

“This is an opportunity for vaccinators to really handle the material they are going to use. By the nature of the role, they will come into contact with people who are on the border. It felt like a sensible cohort to be doing the vaccines in place.”

The vaccinators are mostly nurses, now all educated on the details of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The Nurses Organization’s professional nursing advisor, Kate Weston, said the group, all vaccinators licensed prior to this, were more than ready.

“They already have the basic education skills and knowledge because that is their role. And they have had specific training and education about the vaccine itself.”

The CEO of supply chain specialist Kaptura, Mark Singh, said that moving something so important at such low temperatures was a high-tech challenge.

He said that “cold chain”, the term for moving refrigerated products, did not even fit the requirements of this vaccine; this was in the cryogenic range.

“It becomes a cryogenic chain; anything that goes below [negative] 40 enters the cryogenic space, from a logistical perspective. That becomes a completely different ball game. It is literally like moving nuclear medicine. The closest comparison is when radioactive elements move. “

He said that each box of vaccine vials would have live GPS monitoring, with statistics on their temperature, humidity, even how much they were tilted and fed to monitored computers.

Singh said that if something started to go wrong, constant monitoring meant that steps could be taken to prevent it. For example, the vials begin to heat up.

“So if you said that two to eight degrees is my tolerance limit, if something reaches six degrees, I need to know, so that before it crosses eight I can take some action on it. That is something that is possible in real time, to get that kind of information. “

The process from developing a vaccine to approval often takes a decade or more.

This time last year, New Zealand had zero known cases. Today will be the first shot that may herald the beginning of the end of the pandemic.