Pfizer to Complete First Covid-19 Vaccine Shipments in U.S.

A second round of shipments was slated to start Thursday and finish Sunday, completing an initial 2.9 million tranche. Federal officials also said Wednesday that another tranche of 2 million doses would begin next week, with an identical amount three weeks later for a booster shot.

Long-term-care facilities in Florida and West Virginia have begun administering the vaccines, said Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s coronavirus response program. He said Ohio and Connecticut are expected to begin vaccinations in facilities Friday, with 1,100 facilities around the country set to begin Monday.

At John Knox Village’s nursing home in Pompano Beach, Fla., paramedics began giving shots Wednesday morning, and no adverse reactions were reported, according to Mark Raynor, director of health-care services. He earlier said around 90% of long-term nursing-home residents were expected to participate.

The Florida vaccination effort, in Pinellas and Broward counties, is one of several launching before the federal long-term care program with CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. That national program is expected to kick off in a few Ohio and Connecticut facilities Friday, then more broadly next week, with the goal of reaching the nation’s approximately 15,600 nursing homes and 29,000 assisted-living communities.

West Virginia started giving the shots to long-term care facilities Tuesday, with about 18 sites getting the vaccine that day, according to the West Virginia Health Care Association, an industry group. Nursing-home staffers in at least a few other places are getting shots this week, according to industry officials.

The pandemic has devastated long-term-care facilities in the U.S., with more than 113,000 deaths so far, according to a Wall Street Journal tally. Cases and deaths have been rising again recently in the midst of the broader increase across the U.S.

A health-care worker in Juneau, Alaska, was hospitalized after receiving the vaccine Tuesday at Bartlett Regional Hospital, in what officials there called the first known case in the U.S. of an allergic reaction to the shot.

The woman, whose name wasn’t released, recovered from the anaphylactic reaction after being administered medication and was expected to be discharged from the facility later Wednesday.

“She was very positive throughout, except when she was having an anaphylactic reaction,” Bartlett’s Dr. Noble Anderson said in a briefing. “She was excited she got the first dose and disappointed she will not be getting the second dose.”

The episode comes after reports of allergic reactions in the U.K. after the vaccines were authorized. The woman in Alaska has no history of allergies but suffered a reaction that included shortness of breath 10 minutes after taking the vaccine, officials of the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services said.

The worker took Benadryl after the symptoms began, but when she didn’t improve, she was admitted to the emergency room of Bartlett and was administered epinephrine through intravenous drip as well as Pepcid and Benadryl and kept overnight, they said. Officials said the woman was off all medications Wednesday.

The Food and Drug Administration takes seriously reports of any adverse events and requires Pfizer and vaccination providers to report serious ones, an FDA spokeswoman said. The FDA’s materials for doctors and nurses say the vaccine shouldn’t be administered to people with known histories of a severe allergic reaction to any components of the vaccine.

Pfizer was working with local health authorities to assess the situation in Alaska, a spokeswoman said. In its clinical trial, there were no signals of serious allergic reactions associated with the vaccine, according to the company. Pfizer excluded people from its trial if they had a history of severe adverse reaction associated with a vaccine or its components.

Public-health officials and health authorities have been counting on a vaccine’s arrival to help bring an end to the pandemic and allow gatherings and the reopening of schools and businesses. Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine came in record time, less than a year, and one from Moderna Inc. could be cleared by regulators later this week.

“I was always optimistic that this could be accomplished,” said Dr. Lloyd Minor, dean of Stanford University School of Medicine, which expects to receive 3,900 doses Friday. “These clinical trials have been done very rigorously. They’ve been done quickly, but they’ve been done with enormous rigor and volumes of data.”

The U.S. reported 198,357 new cases of coronavirus Tuesday, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The daily death toll rose to 3,019, the third highest of the pandemic.

Federal officials say the rollout, a complex process given the requirement to ship the vaccines at ultracold temperatures, has largely gone as planned, although Gen. Perna said Wednesday that some doses destined for Alabama and California became too cold and weren’t delivered.

The doses were returned to Pfizer, and new doses were shipped, Gen. Perna said. He said federal officials were working with Pfizer to determine whether vaccines that arrive colder are still safe to use.

Pfizer has since shipped 1,950 doses to Mobile, Ala., 975 doses to Napa, Calif., and 975 doses to Sonora, Calif., according to a Health and Human Services spokeswoman.

In New Mexico on Tuesday, workers noticed a possible temperature change with one of the state’s 18 batches of vaccines and discarded 75 doses for the sake of safety, said a spokesman for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Delivery of Pfizer’s vaccine could face an early setback as a winter storm began hitting the East Coast on Wednesday. But shipping companies and local and state government officials said they were prepared for the region’s first major snowfall this year.

AccuWeather forecasters predict the storm may be the largest in years, with portions of the Interstate 95 corridor potentially due for major disruptions and power outages.

A team of 15 FedEx Corp. meteorologists was monitoring conditions, and nearly 200 logistics specialists will continue coordinating the movement of truck and flight shipments, said a spokeswoman. United Parcel Service Inc. said it had a team of weather experts monitoring events.

Early supply of the vaccine is limited, which has led health authorities to give priority to doctors, nurses and other health-care workers, as well as residents of long-term-care facilities. Much of the general population isn’t expected to receive vaccines until spring or summer of next year, when supply increases and there could be additional vaccines authorized.

Because of the limited number of people vaccinated early on, the shots “won’t have a noticeable effect” on the virus, said William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

As vaccines roll out in the U.S. and the rest of the world, concerns continue to remain regarding whether people will take them.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Wednesday said that vaccine acceptance should improve with the arrival of vaccines. Millions of Americans remain hesitant about taking a Covid-19 vaccine, although Mr. Azar cited recent polls this week that suggested the numbers may be improving.

“Vaccine confidence is surging,” Mr. Azar said.

Still, persuading people to get the shot will be a challenge, including at long-term-care facilities, where surveys have shown vaccine hesitancy among nursing-home workers.

Only around a third of the John Knox Village nursing home’s staff had agreed to get the shots as of Tuesday night, Mr. Raynor said. Overall, around 77 staffers and 90 long-term residents were slated to get the shots as of Tuesday night, he said.

Mr. Raynor said he was surprised at how many staffers declined to get the vaccine during the initial visit, but he hopes more will get the shots in three weeks, when there will be another round. “It’s just the fear of the unknown,” he said.

John Knox Village hasn’t seen any Covid-19 deaths, and there has been only one case among its nursing-home residents, Mr. Raynor said.

The FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Friday of last week, citing its 95% effectiveness at safely preventing symptomatic Covid-19 in a large clinical trial. On Saturday, an advisory committee to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to recommend that the vaccine be used for people ages 16 years and older.

An analysis from the FDA of Moderna’s late-stage trial data found the vaccine to be “highly effective.” The vaccine uses a similar gene-based technology as Pfizer’s vaccine. Gen. Perna said 5.9 million doses of the Moderna vaccine would be shipped next week if regulators authorize it.

—Anna Wilde Mathews, Jim Carlton, Talal Ansari and Dan Frosch contributed to this article.

Write to Jared S. Hopkins at [email protected]