While many actions taken by universities in response to the coronavirus have been retroactive, Auburn University’s Medical Clinic, under the direction of Dr. Fred Kam, has been planning vaccine acquisition and distribution since October of last year.
Kam said the clinic had emergency plans for the mass-vaccination of the campus in place since before the pandemic had even begun.
“You know, we were very fortunate and very proactive back in October and November, working with public health, requesting vaccine doses … having a plan [and] all of that stuff was in place,” Kam said. “Not everybody was as proactive, and now they’re finding out that that has worked somewhat to their detriment.”
As of Friday, Jan. 29, Kam and his team had received 7,000 vaccines from the state of Alabama, of which 5,317 first doses had been administered. The state determines when and where its allotment of vaccines is sent, and they receive vaccines from the federal government.
“We received 3,500 doses on Jan. 6 at about 9 a.m. in the morning, and we were putting shots in people’s arms by about 3-3:30 that afternoon,” Kam said. “We’ve been doing it consistently. We’ve worked cooperatively with the Harrison School of Pharmacy, with the School of Nursing and the Department of Social Work.”
The vaccination site is located on the third floor of Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum. It had been chosen as the site of an emergency mass-vaccination operation before the pandemic had even begun as a closed-pod contingency plan, Kam said.
“Know that even before this pandemic, we already had a plan in place called a closed-pod plan … to execute exactly what we have executed,” Kam said. “We have another plan called an open-pod [plan]; that’s when we get into more community vaccination and stuff.”
No matter how prepared Kam and his team are, they are at the mercy of the state, who are at the mercy of the federal government, Kam said. The amount of vaccines the federal government then receives depends on how many doses the manufacturing companies like Pfizer and Moderna can produce.
“There’s no other way for us to get [vaccine doses],” Kam said. “We can’t go to the commercial [market] to Moderna or Pfizer and buy doses; it’s not possible.”
While the timing of the next allotment of vaccines from the state was not assured as of last Friday, Jan. 29, the distribution of the 7,000 vaccines that Kam and his team have received has been both efficient and fast, according to Susan Youngblood, associate professor and associate chair of the English department. Both Susan and her husband, a professor in media studies, received the vaccine.
“We got to the Coliseum and we had to show our green passports,” Youngblood said. “Once we showed those GuideSafe passports, we were directed inside and the process was straightforward and fluid.”
After entering the Coliseum, Youngblood and her husband were checked in by staff members and were directed to a volunteer who administered their vaccines, she said. They then sat in the 15-minute waiting area designated to check for adverse reactions to the vaccine and registered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as recipients of the vaccine.
“The CDC emailed us [with] links regularly to follow up on any symptoms that we had,” Youngblood said. “The symptom checker was easier even than GuideSafe. When you use the GuideSafe app, you have to go through and select Auburn University as your location each time. This [one] doesn’t require that. All you do is put in your temperature range and symptoms.”
After signing up for the CDC’s symptom checker, Youngblood and her husband were checked out by staff members who gave them a card with the scheduled date for their second dose before exiting the Coliseum.
“It was easy, it was fast, it was efficient; clearly, the process had been thought through carefully,” Youngblood said. “All the chairs, for the waiting area, were separated by 6 feet and the posters on the wall had QR codes to bring you to the [CDC’s] website to register as a vaccine recipient.”
Youngblood received an email that had a link to a vaccine form that she could fill out, which asked questions about pre-existing health conditions and the “risk-factor” of one’s workplace. Filling this form out allowed Youngblood to enter the pool for vaccine selection, which she was subsequently selected for.
Similar to Youngblood, Brittney Hatfield, junior in pre-nursing, was emailed a vaccine form that she could fill out in the Auburn newsletter.
“I got an email over the break,” Hatfield said. “Because I work in housing, [I] was able to get it … around January 6th. It was in the Auburn newsletter that they send out every week and there was a link [there] to sign up.”
Hatfield experienced the same process that Youngblood and her husband went through, and left the Coliseum after waiting 15 minutes in the area designated to watch for adverse reactions to the vaccine. Other than some soreness, Hatfield didn’t feel any reaction to the vaccine.
“Soreness was the only thing I had,” Hatfield said. “It was sore the night of and the morning after, but besides that, I didn’t really have anything else.”
Since November, Kam and his team have been communicating with the Alabama Department of Public Health almost every day, and have explained their plan extensively. While many universities have chosen to vaccinate people ages 75 and older, Auburn decided to vaccinate the people who have the most contact with others, Kam said.
“To be blunt, if we had just focused on giving [vaccines] to eligible 75-year-olds within the Auburn University community, which was for whom the vaccine allotment was for, we would have probably given out less than 100 doses out 3,500 and sit on [them] for weeks while we wait for others to decrease the age ranges.”
The goal of this method of vaccine distribution is to inoculate the portion of the population that has the highest exposure to other people, whether that be Tiger Transit drivers, food and dining workers or members of the security force. This thinking also led Auburn to use a portion of the second allotment of doses quicker than they were intended to be administered.
“We received a second allotment of 3,500 doses, which were for second doses,” Kam said. “But that meant we were going to sit on [those] vaccines for three weeks before we gave another dose. So the decision was made by a committee, which I am definitely a big proponent of, that we were going to take a little bit of a risk and take half of that second dose allotment and continue administering vaccines over the next two weeks.”
Kam said he hopes that this decision will encourage the Alabama Department of Public Health to give Auburn an additional allotment of vaccines, but for now, Kam and his team have enough of a stock to administer second doses for two weeks.
“I still think it’s the right thing to do,” Kam said. “The vaccine is not doing any good sitting in a refrigerator or a freezer. Either we’re going to look like we were brilliant or we’re going to have some upset people, half of the first people who got the first dose, upset with us if we don’t get any allocation within the next two weeks.”
Despite the possibility for delays, in the case of the Moderna vaccine, which is the vaccine that Auburn has been administering, second doses can still be administered even if more than 28 days have passed since the administering of the first dose, Kam said.
“When the decision was made that 28 days should be when the second dose should be given [for the Moderna vaccine], that was based on studies that were done and they found that the 28th day was the shortest, shortest optimal time to give the second dose,” Kam said. “It could be 28 days, two weeks after that, six weeks after that; you can give it later, you just can’t give it earlier.”
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