ESCANABA — For some, the COVID-19 vaccine may be a Christmas miracle. While only a small portion of Delta County, the rollout of vaccinations locally has been going well.

“So far things are running very smoothly,” said Jennie Miller, immunization/communicable disease coordinator for Public Health, Delta & Menominee Counties.

According to a report Miller received earlier this week, roughly 300 people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 so far in Delta County. Those vaccinations have been among healthcare professionals, which was the first group to be designated as vaccine recipients by the state’s vaccination guidlines.

Also included in the first round of vaccinations were residents and staff at nursing homes and long-term care facilities across the state. However, the health department is unaware of how many vaccines have been distributed to people in these facilities, as those vaccinations are being done by Walgreens and CVS under a federal contract.

The Daily Press reached out to Walgreen’s to discover how many doses had been administered in Delta County and how many long-term care facilities were being vaccinated. However, current numbers were not available.

“States and long-term care facilities continue to finalize their vaccine distribution plans, so we cannot provide specific numbers at this time. We are prepared to administer vaccines as soon as inventory is available and the CDC, states and facilities finalize their plans. The federal government will determine the amount of COVID-19 vaccines designated for each jurisdiction,” said Emily Delnicki, senior account executive for Walgreens.

“We will continue to expand vaccinations to nearly 3 million residents and staff at 35,000 long-term care facilities that have selected Walgreens as their vaccine provider as states finalize their distribution plans and receive vaccine allocations,” she added.

OSF St. Francis HealthCare Hospital and Medical Group, one of three healthcare facilities authorized by the state to distribute the vaccine, gave its first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Dec. 17. According to Miller, that vaccine is being shipped out in minimum increments of 975 doses.

A second vaccine shipment has also hit the county, and according to Miller, the vaccine produced by Moderna, which was approved by the Food and Drug Association on Dec. 18, is now being distributed in Escanaba, as well. The Moderna vaccine is being shipped out in smaller quantities — a minimum of 100 doses per shipment — but it does not require the ultra-cold temperatures the Pfizer vaccine needs to remain stable while in storage.

Both vaccines are mRNA vaccines, a type of vaccine that has been in development for decades but has never been approved in the United States. The vaccines do not contain the coronavirus. Instead, they use a piece of genetic code to train the recipient’s immune system to identify the spiky protein on the surface of the virus. If the real virus appears in the body in the future, the immune system is prepared to attack.

It will most likely be months before the state of Michigan announces that it has moved on to the second phase of its COVID-19 vaccination program, which is a wide-scale effort to vaccinate everyone over the age of 16. According to the FDA, the Pfizer vaccine has been approved for patients as young as 16. The Moderna vaccine is limited to patients 18 years of age or older.

Regardless of which vaccine a patient gets, the two vaccines currently approved in the United States both require a second dose at a later date.