Abbeville General will receive COVID vaccines Wednesday

Last week, Gov. John Bel Edwards said nearly 40,000 COVID-19 vaccines may be distributed to healthcare workers in Louisiana within the first week of the FDA approving their use.
On Wednesday, Abbeville General announced it will be getting the vaccine and will be distributing the
vaccine to frontline workers first.
Last week, Edwards was among four governors the Trump administration invited to Washington, D.C., to discuss vaccine distribution plans given the quality of those plans.
The state’s COVID-19 vaccine playbook spells out just who would get the vaccine first when it’s approved.
Healthcare workers at hospitals would be followed by residents at nursing homes.
The three-phase plan aims for everyone else who wants a vaccine getting it by the summer of 2021 if no problems arise.
The FDA could approve the Pfizer vaccine as early as Thursday.
Dr. Joseph Kanter, interim assistant secretary of the state’s Office of Public Health, said things will move quickly whenever that happens.
“From the time the FDA gives that authorization, we could realistically see people being vaccinated here within 24 to 48 hours,” he said.
The vaccine would quickly go to all corners of the state, to hospitals large and small.
“People — really, frontline hospital and healthcare staff — will begin to be vaccinated immediately,” Kanter said.
The first shipments of a COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use in the United States headed Sunday from Michigan to distribution centers across the country, with the first shots expected to be given in the coming week to health care workers and at nursing homes.
Shipments of the Pfizer vaccine will set in motion the biggest vaccination effort in American history at a critical juncture of the pandemic that has killed 1.6 million and sickened 71 million worldwide.
Initially, about 3 million doses were expected to be sent out, and the priority is health care workers and nursing home residents as infections, hospitalizations and deaths soar in the U.S.
With numbers likely to get worse over the holidays, the vaccine is offering a bright spot in the fight against the pandemic that’s killed nearly 300,000 Americans.