Fairfax County Health Department Gets Its First COVID-19 Vaccines

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — The Fairfax County Health Department received its first COVID-19 vaccine shipment on Wednesday, helping to get doses to more health care workers.

The initial allocation is 5,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine. The health department's shipment will cover health care workers not affiliated with hospital systems. Fairfax County's hospital systems, Inova Health System and Reston Hospital Center, received their first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine shipments last week and have started to vaccinate staff and affiliated providers.

During the health department's current vaccination phase, it is communicating directly with health care providers using contact information in county and state practitioner databases and their respective representative associations.

Health care workers as well as long-term care facility residents and staff are first in line for the vaccine as the group 1a priority group recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Virginia Department of Health. Many Virginia long-term care facilities signed onto the federal program for vaccinations and will receive on-site vaccinations from CVS and Walgreens starting the week of Dec. 28.

An exact date for the vaccines to become available to the general public has not been determined, but it will be in 2021. Residents can find more resources on the vaccines from the health department and other sources at www.fairfaxcounty.gov/health/novel-coronavirus/vaccine.

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This article originally appeared on the McLean Patch