North Alabama vaccine distribution

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As coronavirus vaccine candidates get closer to reaching the approval and distribution stages -- we wanted to get a better sense of the role huntsville hospital will play.

Waay 31's will robinson-smith joins us live outside of the hospital.

He spoke with their infectious diseases pharmacist about how they're preparing for the vaccine... will?

As we've reported -- the vaccines manufactured by pfizer and moderna are showing quite a bit of promise at this stage.

Huntsville hospital says it is prepared for the first step in doling them out -- vaccinating health care workers.

With a deep-freezing refrigerator already on hand at huntsville hospital -- specialists like jonathan edwards are confident that they can handle as much vaccine as they are given for health care workers in phase one of distribution.

Jonathan edwards, infectious diseases pharmacist and with that freezer, we can store anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 doses.

And then also with the moderna vaccine, we have a capacity to store about 30,000 doses for that vaccine as well.

He and others, like state health officer dr. scott harris, believe alabama won't get quite enough doses to vaccinate the full medical and first responder community in the first wave.

That means storage won't be an issue in the near future.

We'll probably be getting more of the pfizer vaccine than the moderna vaccine.

And so, trying to take care of, primarily, the madison county campuses of huntsville hospital and then once that additional vaccine becomes available, it might be more applicable to being more readily distributed.

Will robinson-smith and while places like huntsville hospital are preparing for an eventual vaccine to come on the market... they're also working with currently available therapeutics as well as preparing for a new monoclonal antibody treatment on the horizon.

We're not quite at the phase of home treatments just yet, but edwards says it's another promising step.

This type of therapy is actually a totally different way of looking at covid.

So, before we had to wait until the patient basically got to the hospital before we provide them with any therapy because there really wasn't anything available as an outpatient.

The food and drug adminisration granted ely lilly and co.

Emergency use authorization last week for those who have mild to moderate covid-19.

It's not for those who are hospitalized for the virus or who require oxygen.

With the preliminary studies, what they're seeing is actually a reduction in the number of patients that actually have to come to the emergency room or to the hospital if they receive this medication, this monoclonal antibody.

And this is specifically prevalent in the patients that are elderly or that are obese.

That's where we see the most benefit.

As of tonight -- that treatment isn't available in the community or at hospitals.

Edwards says about 300- thousand doses were made available through the federal government.

He says alabama is slated to get some amount of the drug.

They expect to get more clarity on how much the state will receive within a week or so.

Reporting live at huntsville hospital -- will robinson-smith -- waay 31 news.