They were shots seen and heard across Pennsylvania and beyond.
“I feel like I was a chosen one,” said Malinda Lampley, a patient care technician at UPMC Pinnacle Harrisburg Hospital.
Lampley was among the first six frontline Harrisburg Hospital employees to receive a shot of COVID-19 vaccine on Friday afternoon. News reporters and TV cameras looked on. Each injection took hardly a minute — it looked like people getting routine flu shots at work — and generated a round of applause.
Similar scenes took place at other central Pennsylvania hospitals on Friday, including York-based WellSpan Health hospitals and Geisinger in Montour County.
Across Pennsylvania, nearly 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine were expected to have arrived at roughly 90 hospitals and health systems by the end of Friday. Still more hospitals will be receiving vaccine next week.
If all goes according to plan, Pennsylvania will receive hundreds of thousands more doses in the coming weeks, with early shipments going to additional health care workers and people at high risk living in nursing homes.
Dr. John Goldman, the vice president of medical affairs, said UPMC Pinnacle expects to vaccinate all its employees within six weeks.
As front-line medical workers become vaccinated, he said, they can care for severely-ill COVID-19 patients without great fear of becoming sick themselves, and it becomes less likely UPMC Pinnacle will run short of caregivers.
COVID-19 vaccine is voluntary for UPMC employees.
Lampley said getting vaccinated was an easy decision. She has a young daughter and a grandmother to take care of, she noted. A cousin and an aunt died of COVID-19.
“I’d rather get the vaccine than get the virus and get sick and die,” she said.
Goldman expressed confidence in the trials and government review, which have found the first vaccines to be about 95% effective and without serious side effects, and said UPMC has also conducted its own review.
The main side effect so far has been some people getting a fever within a day or so of being vaccinated, said Goldman, who also received the vaccine Friday and continued working.
He noted COVID-19 is presently accounting for about 200,000 hospitalizations across the country and 2,000-3,000 deaths per day.
“There’s clearly much higher risk from the virus than there is from the vaccine,” Goldman said.