Southeast Health was the first hospital in Alabama to administer the COVID-19 vaccine shortly after 8 on Tuesday morning.

Walter Doty IV, MD, medical director of the Southeast Health Critical Care received the first dose from Chris Holland, RN, director of Surgical Services. Almost simultaneously, Ravi Nallamothu, MD, medical director of Southeast Health Hospitalist received the second dose from Ben Ryals, RN, nurse manager of the Southeast Health Emergency Department. Neither physicians experienced any immediate side effects from the vaccine. They were required to be monitored for 15 minutes after the vaccine was injected.

“I think this is the first day where the tide is starting to turn here, at least as far as a way to not just treat this disease and we’ve been doing a ton of that,” Dr. Doty told local media gathered to document the historic injection Tuesday morning. “We actually now may be able to prevent it from happening in the first place.”

Southeast Health received its shipment of 1,950 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine Monday morning. We have a 10-day window to administer the vaccines from when we received it. It is being stored in an ultra-cold temperature freezer in our pharmacy as prescribed by the manufacturer. Once the vaccine is thawed out, it has to be administered within six hours.

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Southeast Health has been at the forefront with plans in place to take care of those we serve.

Because of our attention to detail and planning for the vaccine, Southeast Health was among the first 15 hospitals selected by the Alabama Department of Public Health to receive the vaccine.

We implementing our plan to vaccinate not only hospital frontline staff, who are at the highest risk for exposure to COVID-19, but also other high exposure risk frontline workers in the community.

We realize the initial doses of the vaccine will not be enough to cover all frontline healthcare workers and we will be coordinating with other hospitals in our area, local physicians, and EMS to develop a plan that quickly provides access to the first round of vaccinations to those identified by ADPH as the high-risk exposure group.

We don’t have any specifics about future distribution of the vaccine, but will be working closely with ADPH as information at the state and federal level becomes available.

Our goal is to ensure our frontline healthcare workers who are at the highest risk for exposure can be effectively and efficiently vaccinated as soon as possible to help protect not only these employees, but also their patients.

With the initial limits on the amount of vaccine to be received, it will likely be sometime in 2021 before the vaccine is available to the general public. Anyone with questions can go to www.adph.org and search for the COVID-19 vaccine page.

Nursing home residents and staff of nursing homes will be receiving vaccine through a federal program activated earlier this week. Through this program, the federal government contracted with several pharmacies to hold vaccination clinics at nursing homes. All questions about this should be directed to the Alabama Nursing Home Association or to ADPH.