Around dawn on Tuesday, Paul Krogh and his colleagues at North Memorial Health greeted an important package at their Minneapolis hospital’s loading dock: A single box containing 975 doses of the game-changing Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, ready to be given to hundreds of the hospital’s front-line workers.
“Our first doses are here,” Krogh, the hospital’s pharmacy services director, said as hospital staff cheered. “It’s an exciting time.”
With so much hope riding on the creation and approval of vaccines meant to halt the spread of COVID-19, hospital officials say watching that first batch of shots arrive on their doorsteps has been a huge relief.
During his visit to the Indian Health Service clinic in the village of White Earth Tuesday, Rear Adm. Michael Weahkee talked about the challenges of distributing the coronavirus vaccine to hundreds of tribal nations across the country. We re in some of the most rural and remote locations in our country,” the IHS director said, “but we have worked for months to ensure this distribution is seamless.
As the coronavirus vaccine makes its way to states and tribal nations across the country, health care workers on reservations in Minnesota are among the first to be vaccinated. The Indian Health Service office in Bemidji, which serves tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, was the first IHS office in the nation to receive the vaccine.