Just days after the federal government approved the first Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use in America, Olmsted Medical Center became one of the first medical facilities in the country to receive a shipment — meaning the Covid-19 vaccine is officially in Rochester.

OMC says 975 doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine arrived in Rochester around 7 a.m. Monday. Rochester-based frontline health care workers in Phase 1A — those working in hospitals with Covid-stricken patients — are in line to receive 440 of those doses, in addition to some ambulance teams scattered across southeast Minnesota. Additional shipments of the vaccine to other sites in Rochester and across the state are expected as early as Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters Monday, top OMC officials said they had known for some time that a shipment would be coming soon after FDA approval, but still felt a feeling of relief and optimism as the first boxes were unloaded into OMC’s super-cooled freezers.

“We’ve been waiting for several weeks, as far as knowing when it was coming in, and we’ve been anticipating this day,” said Anna Baldwin, director of pharmacy services at OMC. “To be able to know that it’s here, it’s a really exciting, rewarding day for us.”

The vaccine inside a freezer / courtesy Olmsted Medical Center

Tom Graham, OMC’s director of plant operations, said the vaccine will not be administered until December 21 — still on track, however, with the plan announced by Gov. Walz and the Minnesota Department of Health. The coming days, Graham said, will be used to train OMC staff in the Covid-19 vaccination process.

“We’ve been in planning stages over these past several weeks at an in-depth level,” said Graham. “We’ll continue to receive additional doses, and that will help us move through Phase 1A tiering and vaccinate all those workers. We’ll continue to move through the phases until all healthcare workers are vaccinated.”

OMC was one of three Minnesota hospitals to receive a vaccine shipment Monday — the others being North Memorial Health in Robbinsdale and Sanford Health in Bemidji. Another shipment of 975 Pfizer doses is scheduled to arrive at OMC next Monday, according to Graham, and additional doses could arrive in Rochester as soon as tomorrow - which would be stored at Mayo Clinic. OMC and Mayo are two of 25 statewide “hubs” for vaccine storage and distribution, outlined in Gov. Walz’s vaccine plan released last week.

Dr. Randy Hemann, chief medical officer at OMC, called this moment the first “light at the end of the tunnel” in the fight against Covid-19. The speed at which these vaccines were developed, he says, is the greatest achievement of all — just nine months after the pandemic took hold, the tools are falling into place to end the pandemic for good.

“I don’t think people understand how momentous this is,” said Dr. Hemann. “In the moment you may not know what’s really happening, but when you think back to some of the other things that we’ve gone through in history — the World Wars, even the [1918] Spanish flu — we [in the medical community] have never been able to connect with each other like this.”

Isaac Jahns is a Rochester native and a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He reports on politics, business and music for Med City Beat.

Cover photo: Tom Graham, director of plant operations at OMC, and Tim Weir, the hospital’s CEO, hold the first shipment of Covid vaccines to arrive in Rochester