Hospital Provo is trying to administer 1,900 doses of COVID-19 vaccine before Friday

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Doses of the Pfizer vaccine will not be wasted, a spokeswoman for the Utah County Health Department said.

(Courtesy of the University of Utah Health) A bottle of the Pfizer / BioNTech version of the COVID-19 vaccine.

| February 11, 2021, 11:56 p.m.

| Updated: February 12, 2021, 1:11 am

A Provo hospital has approximately 1,900 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine it needs to get into people’s arms.

Provo Utah Valley Hospital officials have told neighboring counties that if there are people 70 or older who can reach Provo on Friday afternoon, a shot of the Pfizer vaccine is available.
People can sign up for an appointment by going to the Utah County Department of Health website: https://healthevents.utahcounty.gov/.
Lance Madigan, a spokeswoman for Intermountain Healthcare, said the hospital had scheduled appointment blocks for Utah County residents to receive the shots, but many time slots remained uncovered.

“We don’t know if everyone who wants to has already done so or if it’s a technological problem, because yes [people] 70 more and we ask people to sign up [online] before they come, ”Madigan said.

Aislynn Tolman-Hill, a spokeswoman for the Utah County Department of Health, said her agency has noticed a decrease in the number of appointments for the vaccine over the past week. “In fact, we’re starting to see, perhaps, that we’re reaching the end of the crowd of over 70s that we’ve been trying to vaccinate,” he said.

Utah County, Tolman-Hill said, also has its share of “hesitant hesitation”: people want to “see what happens, how it’s going for everyone” before they get shot themselves.

Nicholas Rupp, a spokesman for the Salt Lake County Health Department, said his office received news of the doses available Thursday. The Salt Lake County agency began calling people who had vaccine waiting lists, asking if any of them could drive down to Provo and get a shot.

Hospital staff in Provo, Madigan said, worked to “just prepare enough to meet demand as it arrived, so that we minimized waste as much as possible. … We will go through a process. These will not be abandoned. “

“They don’t take doses out of the freezer unless they know they’ve already talked about those appointments,” Tolman-Hill said.

The Pfizer vaccine should be kept stored at very cold temperatures and pharmacists usually thaw vials when they know the vaccine will be used.

Rupp said his agency officials discussed moving the doses of Provo to a Salt Lake County vaccination site. Rupp said they “opted against the move,” because we’re already at full capacity with who we have staff with and everything we have. [Friday and Saturday] in our current sites “.

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