LAKELAND Nurses and other front-line workers at Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center got their first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday morning as numbers of local infections remained high.
Hospital employees at the highest risk of exposure from patients with COVID-19 received injections of the vaccine developed by Moderna. They will need booster shots in about four weeks for the vaccine to be fully effective.
Lakeland Regional Health is not requiring workers to be inoculated against the viral illness, but executives are urging employees to receive the vaccinations.
“We highly encourage our team members to consider receiving this promising vaccine,” Dr. Timothy J. Regan, the hospital’s president and chief medical officer of Lakeland Regional Health, said in a news release. “As an emergency medicine physician, I just received my vaccination and have full confidence in the science behind these vaccines. This is an important next step in keeping our team, patients, the