MILWAUKEE- One of the largest healthcare systems in Wisconsin and Illinois says it plans on offering employees the opportunity to receive a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as they can.
“Mass vaccinations is our only way out of the pandemic,” Advocate Aurora Healthcare infectious disease doctor Robert Citronberg said during a call with reporters this morning. “It is not without side effects, they are expected with vaccines, but it’s no doubt that the benefits outweigh the risk. This is the message we are sending to our teammates.”
Cintronberg says he believes vaccinations could begin, on a voluntary basis, next week.
“We do not have any plans to mandate the vaccine,” Dr. Cintronberg said. “While it’s been studied for a few months we don’t have enough data regarding any long-term effects of it and we believe a more prudent approach is to encourage the vaccine among our team members.
Aurora Chief Medical Officer Dr. Gary Stuck says they are treating 960 in-house patients across the entire system, 575 in Illinois, 385 in Wisconsin, many of those patients are being treated at the system’s largest hospitals.
Wisconsin is in line to receive roughly 50-thousand doses of the Pfizer vaccine, enough to vaccinate about 25-thousand people. Cintronberg says the process to get the vaccine to everybody who wants one, country-wide, could take about six months.