It arrives without fanfare. Eight hours later, a nurse injects it into the arm of a health care worker, who raises his fist in triumph.
It’s the moment for which many have been hoping and praying for nearly a year. All the hand-washing, masks, personal protective equipment (PPE), challenges both logistical and personal, fears, suffering and sorrow have led to this. A vaccine. Hope at last.
On Dec. 21, 2020, the day the first shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 arrives, Penn State Health’s acute care hospitals have treated and discharged 1,389 people who contracted the illness since the pandemic began. One-hundred-thirty-nine Penn State Health patients have died from the disease. At Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, people are holding their breath for what could be the beginning of the end of the pandemic.
“We were tracking it like a kid tracking their package at Christmas,” Deborah Berini, the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center president, tells Dr. Donovan McQuaite, the first employee to receive the vaccine.
Four days earlier, Penn State Health St. Joseph Medical Center received its first 975 doses. The day after Hershey Medical Center received its first doses, Penn State Health Holy Spirit Medical Center received its first box full of vials. Since then, the hospitals have immunized more than 10,000 of their employees, starting with those most exposed to the virus.
At Hershey, in the hours between the vaccine’s arrival and McQuaite’s arm, inventory personnel and pharmacy technicians run a gauntlet they’ve never run before, fine-tuning process against time and temperature to ensure the vaccine can start saving lives.
It begins with a cardboard box.
7:49 a.m. Shipment arrives
Nick Loftus, supervisor for Shipping and Receiving at Hershey Medical Center, receives the delivery of COVID-19 vaccinations at dock B.
Four days before Christmas, a UPS man walks through a cold morning to a Hershey Medical Center supply building hugging the box.
It’s easy to miss the significance. The man wears a jacket and a brown UPS ball cap, not a hazmat suit. He steps up to the loading dock and passes the white cardboard cube to Nick Loftus, who stoops to take it.
The shipping and receiving supervisor has only worked at Hershey Medical Center for three months. “A lot of times, we’re getting stuff like mops,” he says. “This is definitely the biggest thing that’s hit the dock since I’ve been here.”
It weighs 60.7 pounds. It shipped through the night from Kalamazoo, Mich., by UPS Next Day delivery. The label says it contains dry ice. It might be a mail-order steak dinner or popsicles. Instead, inside is the vaccine.
Elsewhere in the Strategic Services Building on the west end of campus, an army of facilities personnel have converted rooms to keep pace with the virus. Shelves rise to the warehouse ceilings loaded with PPE and other supplies geared to halt the pandemic that has sickened millions worldwide and killed more than 350,000 in the U.S.
“Typically, this building has held some needles, some syringes and the Ebola stuff,” says Justin Kemp, manager of supply and logistics, looking up at his shelves. “Since COVID, it’s been going full throttle.”
7:50 a.m. Delivery
Brad Delessio, a receiving clerk at Hershey Medical Center, transports the package of COVID-19 vaccinations to the pharmacy.
Loftus sets the box on a cart, and Bradley Delessio pushes it away, speed walking.
“We always say boxes are boxes,” he says, “but this is one everybody’s been waiting for.”
He wheels it aboard a service elevator that takes him down one level. The doors open into a tunnel. Delessio marches its length at his fast clip, several hundred yards under parking lots and landscaping beneath Penn State College of Medicine. It takes several minutes to reach an entry marked Pharmacy where he elbows a button that opens the door.
“Morning, Stef,” he says. “Got a hot package.”
“Yay!” someone says.
The room is filled with lab equipment and the soft hum of machines. Delissio unloads his cargo onto a shelf. A handful of people in masks gather.
“We might need an armed guard outside,” someone says. There are a few nervous laughs.
8 a.m. Into the freezer
Raven Dailey, a pharmacy inventory coordinator at Hershey Medical Center, stores the first package of COVID-19 vaccinations in the freezer at the pharmacy.
Pharmacy Buyer Raven Dailey cuts open the cardboard flaps. Under several pieces of packing foam rests a silver bag in a nest of 32 pounds of dry ice.
From the thermal bag, they pull two flat, cardboard boxes, each the size of a small, microwave pizza.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine – the first developed in the U.S. – must be kept between -60 and -80 degrees Celsius.
The shipment splits 390 vials between the two boxes. Each purple-capped vial contains five doses, for a total of 1,950. The pharmacists could stretch it to six doses per vial according to information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
They have to put it into the freezer within five minutes, or it’s all ruined.
The freezer is not a Maytag. It’s a mammoth, gray machine with a large digital gauge on the front that reads -75 degrees at the moment. Penn State Health purchased the device specifically for the vaccine. It had a smaller freezer capable of dipping to those depths of temperature, but that freezer is used to store experimental drugs. Federal regulations won’t allow both to take up the same space.
Several layers of redundancy protect it from a power outage. It’s on an emergency outlet, which means Hershey Medical Center’s generators will keep it running in a blackout. It has two compressors. If one fails, the other switches on to take its place. There’s also a carbon dioxide tank if the other three precautions fail.
Dailey carries the boxes to the freezer and puts them in.