NBC 6’s Marissa Bagg has more on why the system in Miami was delayed in their arrivals of the much sought after COVID-19 vaccine.
Jackson Health System in Miami will have to wait an extra day to receive the initial doses of the new COVID-19 vaccine.
A spokesperson for the the state's largest network of public hospitals said they weren't given a reason for the delay.
Three other Florida hospital systems - Memorial Regional in Broward, UF Health in Jacksonville and Tampa General - received the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Monday. Advent Health in Orlando is also expected to get a vaccine shipment on Tuesday.
At a news conference at Tampa General Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the vaccine rollout in the state would continue throughout the week.
“We are hoping that the Pfizer order is fulfilled for the next two weeks beyond we are getting today and tomorrow," DeSantis said.
The arrival of a vaccine among Jackson Health employees was met with muted enthusiasm. A survey released last week found just under half of staffers surveyed were interested in a vaccine in the first round.
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Emergency Room dr. David Woolsey is one of them. The 60-year-old expressed confidence in the data released by Pfizer and said he would get a vaccine at the first opportunity.
"For me the benefit is tremendous in terms of my safety and the risk has been assessed the best it can in a period of a few months where thousands of people have received this vaccine and nothing bad has happened," Woolsey said.
The survey caught the eye of top health officials. On Sunday, the director of the National Institutes of Health said getting enough people vaccinated could prove challenging especially if health care workers forego inoculation.
“This is a source of great concern," Dr. Francis Collins said. "I think all reasonable people, if they have the chance to sort of put the noise aside and disregard all those terrible conspiracies, would look at this and say 'I want this for my family, I want it for myself.'"
