On Monday, a total of 9,841 Oklahomans received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at the Embassy Suites mega vaccine pod. The pod was hosted in partnership by IMMYLabs, the Cleveland County Health Department and other local entities.
Each of the people who ran the mega-pod on Monday said they believe that not only can they duplicate this method again, but they can make this the new normal.
"I think it's now trying to figure out how we do 10,000 on a regular basis," said IMMYLabs CEO Sean Bauman. "[Whether that be] once a week, doing 10,000 or maybe even 20,000 once a week. I'm not quite sure but it depends on vaccine supply. There's a lot of things that it depends on but it's back to the drawing board."
Sara King, spokesperson for the Cleveland County Health Department, said there are dreams in the future to host a pod that would vaccinate 20,000.
That goal seems to me more feasible with the expected authorization of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which only requires one dose, as opposed to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that require two.
"The component of working with Moderna and Pfizer is, though they have tremendous rates of effectiveness, is that it takes you from having to vaccinate a state of 4 million to essentially 8 million," she said. "So, being able to go down to one dose is more logistically feasible. Especially as we get into some of these populations, or some of these groups who are in college ... if they can get a one-dose shot that reduces transmission, that is [more feasible]."
Though the total number of people vaccinated Monday may have been slightly shy of the organizers' original goal of 10,000 people receiving the vaccine the feat is nothing short of remarkable, local health leaders said. Monday's pod was to date the biggest vaccine pod Oklahoma has seen since the vaccine first arrived in the state in mid-December, Bauman said.
"We don't need [ Federal Emergency Management Agency] to come in here with the military to run a mega pod of 6,000 people in a football stadium," said IMMYLabs CEO Sean Bauman. "We can use a ballroom at a conference center and just some local volunteers and we can do more."
This idea of a mega-pod came to Bauman after he had the urge to vaccinate as many people as possible. FEMA originally planned to host its own mega-pod in Oklahoma where 6,000 people would be vaccinated but Bauman wanted to top that.
After watching the Cleveland County Health Department vaccinate about 1,000 people at its first vaccine pod, Bauman said to his team, "How do we do ten times that?"
"The first reaction was, 'You're crazy, you can't do that. We've never given vaccines before.' I said, 'I don't care. We've done lots of stuff we've never done before.' So we figured it out," Bauman said.
After talking with his team, he placed a call to Jackie Kanak, the regional director of the Cleveland County Health Department.
Using an Albert Einstein quote to describe IMMY's relationship with the county health department, Bauman said that IMMYLabs has had the benefit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" in being able to watch the county health department run its vaccine pods and learn from them.
"I really want to highlight these community partnerships," Bauman said. "That is what makes this happen — public and private partnerships. Innovation can take all kinds of different shapes and forms and I think what we're doing is innovative."
Sara King, spokesperson for the Cleveland County Health Department, said she agrees with Bauman that "teamwork makes the dream work." The organizations also partnered with OU Health Services to host Monday's pod.
"Not any one of our organizations could have done this on our own," King said. "So, I think really seeing that part come to life was expected in the sense of how well it went and how we were able to band together so quickly."
Seeing the success this pod had made everyone involved explore the realm of possibility to the point where now they want to host these pods relatively regularly, King said.
"... This is something that we could do relatively regularly or, you know, periodically and more frequently," King said. "[We know] everybody would be on board, even though it's a tremendously long day, just to what you end up accomplishing in that amount of time, [it's worth it]."
Reese Gorman covers COVID-19, local politics and elections for The Transcript; reach him at rgorman@normantranscript.com or @reeseg_3.
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