good afternoon everyone and thank you for coming out uh to pennington um for me at least it's a very exciting day uh but i think it's it's exciting day for a lot of folks in louisiana and while we still have a very long way to go to put this pandemic behind us we know that it's only going to happen once enough of us receive the vaccine and and that's what we're here to talk about today and i know that a lot of louisianans are going to benefit from receiving their covid19 vaccine right here at this facility so i want to start by thanking our lady of the lake the fmol and pennington for their partnership and their efforts to make the max the vaccine more accessible uh to the public at this community community vaccination site today we have administered more than half a million doses of the vaccine across louisiana and quite simply put it wouldn't be possible without our partners hospitals clinics higher education institutions pharmacies and a lot of other partners as well and i'm very thankful for them and i know that they are as dedicated as i am to ending this pandemic also and this is an interesting milestone for me as of today we can say there are more people who've received vaccine in louisiana that have been tested positive for covid19 so there's lots of different metrics to try to measure your progress but but that's one that i think is meaningful this week as you know we officially lowered the vaccine eligibility age to 65 and we also included a few other smaller groups as well including the unified command group which is why i am here today to get my vaccine that's why the secretary of state kyle ardman is here to get vaccine today but also we added some state frontline covid responders and also some election workers for the march and april elections that'll be coming up shortly so with all of the groups that are in the orders of priority that that can currently receive vaccine that's about 1.2 million louisianans so this is progress but as i mentioned we know we still have a long way to go i have been looking forward to this day for some time um i knew that when we started back in december that i was going to wait my turn until my priority group got here which is kind of strange because i'm in charge of deciding what the priority groups are but i knew that we needed to get to some front line essential workers first responder types who who are not in the medical field but responding to the covid emergency and then get to the unified command group and that's why we're here today and i've got several other members of the unified command group that are here that i'll mention in just a moment and for me quite frankly waiting hasn't been easy and so i know that it's not easy for anybody out there who wants the vaccine and we have an awful lot of folks the demand exceeds supply the good news is supply is getting better every week right now not in huge numbers but this week for example 20 more than previous weeks next week we know we'll have a little bump again as well in terms of of the vaccine doses that will be available so our goal is to have everyone vaccinated and we're going to continue adding priority groups as we are able and there's just one analogy that i like to talk about because i think it sort of makes it clear if you have a funnel and the bottom of the funnel is only you know so wide you can put all the folks in the top all the priority you want it's not going to come out any faster and what you're going to do is create a lot more frustration if you do that and quite frankly the other part of this is if you prioritize everybody you really don't prioritize anybody and we're going to do everything we can to make sure that we are addressed first and foremost hospital capacity making sure we are preserving that but also saving lives for those who are eligible and may continue to have questions about whether they should get the vaccine i want to encourage you i have every confidence that the food and drug administration would not have granted the emergency use authorization had these vaccines not been safe and effective i know that the cdc would not have ratified that had these drugs not been safe and effective and so i encourage everyone to be vaccinated when you're able to do that and i'm proud to stand here today alongside secretary of state kyle ordwin we've got dotd secretary dr sean wilson here with us today louisiana work force secretary ava dashwa and dcfs secretary marquita walters all ucg members who will be receiving a vaccine at this time i'm going to turn it over to john kerwin who's the executive director of the biomedical i'm sorry the pennington biomedical center he's going to be followed by richard bath the president and ceo of the franciscan missionaries of our lady health system and then secretary kyl ordwan is going to speak to you all i'll come back at the end of those remarks and i'll have one more announcement and then we'll take a few questions and and then get vaccinated john thank you governor edwards uh dr vath speakers guests it is my distinct honor to welcome you all to pennington today to mark a historic moment in our fight to overcome a coronavirus that has brought much grief and havoc on our community our state and our nation today however is a day of hope is a day that is notable because it demonstrates how we are so much better when we work together what we have here is the combination of strengths unique strengths in science from pennington in healthcare from our lady of the lake and fmol and governance from the government we've created a critical resource for our community the cove vaccination supersite is uniquely positioned to provide easy and quick access to thousands of our citizens we have successfully created a clinic that has the capacity i emphasize the capacity to vaccinate more than seven thousand patients a week our capacity will only be limited by our supply now i have no doubt we're all living in historical times and we're witnessing one of the greatest accomplishments of scientific history the first genetic sequencing of the novel coronavirus was made in january 10th of last year this work led to the production of several vaccines that have been shown to be highly effective against the virus three of those are available to us today through moderna pfizer and astrazeneca so if we had to have a deadly pandemic this was a good time for it to arrive the the application of information technology to biology has allowed the world to react to the threat with the speed that we need to overcome what is indeed a massive viral threat to to humanity so so that said i think one of the things that is particularly notable is that the technology that was used to develop these vaccines was developed using university intellectual property and expertise not unlike the kind of ip and expertise that exists here at pennington but now that we've created the vaccine now the science has created the vaccine our challenge as a community as a state and as a nation is to administer this vaccine to our citizens expeditiously and equitably and as quickly as possible the community covered vaccination site that we're opening here today we feel will do just that uh there's a couple of other things i'd like to highlight from a coveted perspective from pennington perspective and i would like to say thank you to the governor when we have him here today for his support for an initiative that led to funding of an nih grant to conduct cova testing in african-american communities here in baton rouge this is a 1.8 million dollar initiative that will provide free source code to testing to that community this is a partnership with the mayor's healthy initiative in baton rouge and it is funded by nih now we're all challenged by testing um and the need for testing continues to be essential as we seek to overcome the covet mutations that are emerging particularly the more transmissible uk b117 variant and you've heard about the more resistant south african b1351 and brazilian variants we have here pennington the capacity to sequence the virus and to be able to provide the data that's needed to identify those variants in the communities that we're testing and we're offering that service to the state in the fight against coven so i'd like to conclude by thanking everybody who has made this clinic possible uh for your ongoing commitment to the covet battle just know that pennington will always stand ready willing and able to partner with you in order to ensure the health of all the citizens of our community and our state thank you and i would like to hand off to our partner dr richard vance bath from fmol health system well thanks john and thank you governor first of all i have the pleasure and privilege of being the president and ceo of fmlhs and that's really the parent company that uh includes our lady of the lake and all of its clinics and all of its sites we also have other institutions we have nine facilities around louisiana and mississippi i think i want to start by actually thanking the general public one of the things about being in health care and being a health care provider is we have been very very blessed by all of the gracious thanks and gratitude that have come from the public we see it every day on the news we see it in the newspaper that has been very very important for us and i will tell you as a pulmonary critical care physician for 23 years before i actually got into administration that means a lot that means a whole lot to caregivers so really thanks to the community for that that's extremely important for us and we really relish that so i think it's now time for us to offer some thanks back and that's really what the vaccination is really all about you know back in december when it was clear that we would get some vaccines available and started spread around the country we began to talk about how we would organize our thought process and our processes around delivering vaccines to as many people as we could and i made the comment that from a health system perspective vaccination for coronavirus is clearly the number one initiative for us in 2021 without a doubt we'll continue to do the excellent work that we do in caring for people who are desperately sick in our hospitals in our clinics but this was going to be a big focus for us and so we've taken that challenge and what we did knowing that we fully anticipated that post-christmas and new year's we couldn't have the hospital folks all also be focused on vaccinating the community so we engaged our our franciscan health physicians our employed physician group we're the second largest group in the state of louisiana to try to take over the the community vaccination for the community patients and all of those individuals who would fit the demand and the next stages and phases of vaccine distribution so they've really done a great job you know the governor has already said this as a clinician there's no doubt that the vaccines are safe we've looked at this ad nauseam and you hear many stories that come out all the time about some side effects we expect side effects but you know in in the thirty five thousand doses or so that we've given within fmlhs we've not had any serious side effects many of us have taken the vaccines and so we really do encourage people to take the vaccines so really at this point we in i guess late december and early january we started giving vaccines initially to our health care workers but it was critical that in early january we opened up a couple of sites that were important to us we opened a site in north baton rouge on airline highway where we have our er we have our urgent care center and we have a clinic we also opened a site in ascension parish we continue to have those and we will continue to keep those sites open because they're important communities for us and i think for the baton rouge community at large we're excited about this opportunity with dr cohen and the pennington biomedical research institute to be able to provide the individuals to deliver the vaccine in this site this is a wonderful site it's it's a large it's it's a beautifully laid out so we're excited about this and we do hope to exceed 7 000 maybe 7 500 or more vaccines a week so i think this is really key for us i do want to offer a special thanks to a number of folks first first of all dr phillips and and louisiana louisiana department of health because they've been very instrumental not only in guiding us but in working with us to make sure that we could do the fine work that we do also i would like to actually thank the office of public health and dr cantor because of his guidance and all of the work that he has done for us that's been very helpful and a huge thanks for dr kerwin and the partnership that we've created with pennington we have a long-standing relation to relationship with pennington and the fact that we were able to collaborate on this and be able to provide this for the for this community i think is extremely important and lastly of course to governor edwards you know i actually talked to a lot of ceos of systems around the country and louisiana has done remarkably well when we compare ourselves to others and i think that's due to his leadership and the leadership of all of those groups that we mentioned already this has been critical and i really thank all of the health care providers all of our pharmacies pharmacists all of those people who have been part of this vaccination effort that's important so i will end with the saying that we use at fmlhs we're in it to win it and we're going to look forward to being able to expand this community vaccination project to as far as we can take it so thank you very much well thank you all for coming out today and uh it's a gratitude fest uh i believe thanking our lady lake fmol and the pennington center i was just looking around the room the governor and uh the last time i was here there was not a divider and it was a couple years ago and it was a fundraiser for a health care event and now we're here talking about how to save the people in our great state it's an honor to be here with so many heroes fighting on the front line against this deadly disease that has ravaged our state our nation i want to start by thanking all those front line workers we owe you a debt of gratitude you are our heroes i'd like to thank the governor for his leadership during this difficult time i greatly appreciate his willingness to make election workers eligible for the vaccine because of their age many election workers are already eligible for the covet 19 vaccine but those who have not yet crossed that age threshold are still vulnerable thanks to the governor me many election workers under the age of 65 will be eligible for this vaccine greatly increasing their protection and giving us the ability to perform the election like we know we can election workers devote countless hours to helping deliver democracy to the voters of louisiana and we greatly appreciate their sacrifice and will do all we can to help keep them safe in the course of their duties election workers serve a critical purpose and do not receive nearly the credit that they deserve as the boots on the ground for our elections louisiana's election worker population mirrors the rest of the state overwhelmingly elderly my office continues to work to recruit the next generation of poll workers and with this it makes it even more possible to make certain that we're delivering democracy to the people of louisiana i want to thank the secretary phillips for her and her staff and the help that they've given us in order to make this a reality this was these were difficult choices the governor has done a phenomenal job in determining priorities and in our numerous conversations about this issue there was no doubt that there was a lot of um discussion a lot of soul searching that goes into prioritizing different populations in order to take this have this vaccine but i think it's important and he saw the importance of this and i truly thank him for for doing this because it's not i can't imagine his job i know my job is difficult enough in times like this um post-election and prior to the election but the fact of the matter is he he's bearing the brunt of this for our great state and i appreciate all of his efforts and those of his staff and those of his cabinet members and of course everyone uh in unified command group of which i serve we've had a lot to deal with in the last year and we have more to come but the light is around the corner we're beginning to see the options that we have in order to move forward and to be safe again mask is important and vaccinations lead us to the solution that we need i urge all of my friends family and the people of louisiana to use this opportunity to get the vaccine i believe it's safe we all know that any medication has some side effects but the reality is without it we can't survive it so god bless our great state god bless the people of louisiana god bless our health care workers and god we we certainly thank those who work so hard to bring us the vaccine thank you god thank you colin john and richard um before we conclude i did want to give you today's numbers and then make an announcement about the proclamation that expires tomorrow today we report 1321 new cases on 33 236 new tests very sadly we're reporting 20 additional deaths today and the total number of deaths is 9162 in louisiana since the start of the pandemic hospitalizations are at 1122. that is down 22 from yesterday and mechanical ventilator usage is up by two and we currently have 151 patients across the state on ventilators yesterday as i always do in advance of the exploration of proclamation we went through the gating criteria with the folks at lbh and the office of public health and i do have dr joe cantor with me today if you have questions in just a moment that need to be addressed to him um we were able to go through the gated grading i'm sorry the gating criteria yesterday and there has been some progress over the last month or so and we're very very thankful for that the fact of the matter is though the baseline numbers remain very high and concerning those numbers are percent positive those tests that are administered that produce a positive result but new cases uh hospitalizations we still have twice as many people for example with coveted in hospital as we had over the summer and then deaths um and then we we're also really worried about something that was mentioned a few minutes ago and that is the the new uk variant the b117 variant of the chronovirus that we know is in louisiana and spreading and best estimates now are that it's 50 percent more transmissible than the variant that is currently the dominant strain and within the next month or so could easily be the predominant strain in louisiana and elsewhere in the country we also are seeing new evidence that the lethality of that particular strain may be 30 percent higher and there's still a lot of research going into this but there's still a lot to be concerned about every single one of our 64 parishes in louisiana remains red for a high incidence of new cases meaning there are more than 100 new cases per 100 000 population over the past seven days so with all of that in mind and knowing that fat tuesday is tuesday and mindful of what mardi gras did to our state last year and how widely and deeply the virus got seeded into our communities all across louisiana but principally in that greater new orleans metropolitan area i have decided to stay in the modified phase two with the current restrictions in place for 21 more days and i will tell you that i am very hopeful that when we next announce a new proclamation that we will be able to ease some restrictions if we continue on the path that we currently are on so i encourage people to do your part be a good neighbor shouldn't be a lot of indoor gatherings but if they are they need to look like what's happening in this room right now where 100 of the people with the exception of the two of us at the moment are wearing masks and that is as important after you were vaccinated as it was before and i know this can confuse people but the vaccination is effective to prevent you from becoming sick it is not guaranteed to prevent you from becoming infected or infectious and so you can still spread the virus even though it won't make you sick so now more than ever being a good neighbor especially for those who've been vaccinated is worrying about your neighbor and not so much about yourself so our conduct should not change in the foreseeable future [Applause] you know i announced the other day that we had lost 1 000 people in the previous three weeks we've got to get off of that trajectory and deaths are a lagging indicator and as case numbers down go down as hospitalization numbers go down then we should start to see that show up in the death count as well but we're in charge ultimately of what that looks like and i'm just going to encourage everybody in louisiana to do their part so please be very smart and very courteous about how you act and and please wear your mask distance wash your hands frequently stay home when you are sick protect the vulnerable and when you are able to do so please get vaccinated i will take a few questions and maybe not as many as normal because we got some more work to do here greg it's good to see you stranger have you found that the weekly briefings of the white house have changed they have changed a little bit the good news is we are having weekly uh briefings um quite frankly uh they they continue to be extremely important i think the overwhelming majority of governors do participate we had one earlier today and they're they're i think almost all of the ones under the trump administration were video telephone conferences these are primarily telephone only um and they last 45 minutes to an hour um and governors are able to ask questions and and they brief things that are obviously very important to the states and it is a two-way line of communication they will give us some information we tell them what our concerns are and we've actually seen them address our concerns uh in in some things for example the way the cdc reports the data you know it's i think it's it still has a ways to go but if you were paying attention to operation warp speed and the date it had and cdc and very confusing and i think it simplified that uh for example we're able to talk through things like uh allocations uh and it was our request to them that that gave us three weeks of visibility so they told us today that we're going to have an increase uh next week and tell us what that's going to look like and that are planning for the next three weeks will include a minimum of that number of doses going forward um and so so that back and forth is very constructive but but they are they are different um you know we they're led by um mr zeitz who is the white house uh covid 19 task force leader uh and then he has folks on from the cdc and other other folks on as necessary general purna who runs operation warp speed is a is a regular briefer as well at those meetings but they've been very very helpful yes sir governor talk a little bit more about what exactly the white house told you in terms of the number of doses we're going to be getting next week in the subsequent two weeks and also have you made a commitment to our lady of the lake and pennington that you will have a certain number of doses available each week for this site to make sure people are going to be left the second one is no um we haven't made that commitment although um you know again it's helpful to know that for the next three weeks we're going to have the same number of doses coming in at a minimum and that does allow us to better plan and then we can communicate and coordinate earlier and the office of public health works to make sure that the vaccine doses are going out in a way that best serves the the people in terms of both efficiency and equity and i can tell you this operation here will be a big part of that but quite frankly i refrain from using the word mass vaccination right now because i don't believe we're receiving the doses necessary to really do mass vaccination but we are doing uh community vaccination sites that's what this one will be and then when we get enough doses allocated to us and perhaps this will happen and i mentioned this last week i believe uh when the next vaccine is approved and that could be the johnson and johnson uh in the next few weeks we don't know exactly when that's going to happen or what our initial allocation would be but that is a single dose vaccine and the storage requirements are uh less onerous if you will with respect to cold storage and and so forth and so it that vaccine may be one that we employ in mass vaccination sites whether that particular vaccine comes here or or not we don't know yet but we do know that sites like this one across the state are incredibly important for us to meet our goal now with respect to the exact information that we were given today it was it was rather inexact but but we know that there will be an increase of 5 percent for next week we don't know yet whether that's moderna or pfizer uh the increases we had over the last two or three weeks have all been on the moderna side uh so so we believe we have a where's joe it's five five percent for next week don't know which one yeah but we don't know which one we do know that there's a new uh initiative that started by the white house uh where they're going to pick a number of fq fqhcs around the country i believe they're going to pick 250 of those with at least one being in each state in order to directly allocate vaccine to it won't come off the state's allocation we don't know yet how many in louisiana where who they are and so forth but we know that there will be diagnosis allocated in the first week for that effort half a million will be first doses and half a million will be second doses and over the next couple of days we hope to gain better visibility because we're already using fqhcs as part of our overall effort and so we welcome any any initiative that brings additional doses in gets them into the hands of enrolled providers who can put shots in arms we just need the visibility on what especially when they come with their own doses and they don't come out of our allocation we just need better visibility into that so that we can put our plan together around that so that's that's what we know um about next week uh at this point and and i think there will be some additional clarification over the next couple of days yes sir governor until now you've prioritized sending vaccines to pharmacies and local communities why was this the time to open up a community vaccine site why shift well we've been doing this for since the beginning sending vaccine to hospitals and so yet fmo fmol here partnering with pennington um and initially we sent them to hospitals because the first order priority were though those hospital providers and not just your nurses and doctors and therapists but custodians and and people in food service everybody who worked at that setting ever since then we have been sending doses every single week to our hospital partners across the state that includes our biggest hospitals in the state like ochsner and children's and fmol and so forth but it also includes our rural hospitals so what this represents is is just an evolution of what we've been currently doing so that people don't actually have to go to the hospital campus in order to get those doses administered going forward they're going to do it here at pennington and and of course the size of this operation will depend upon the number of doses that they get and i want to i want to feed them as many doses as we can but but making sure that we're being equitable in our distribution and administration around the state yes have now that you ma'am have gone through as a state that all of the nursing homes at least one passed um i think that was supposed to have happened as of this week do you have any better numbers or updated numbers on what the uptick looks like from staff and from um i'm going to ask joe to come up because i i think i know the answer but in case i'm wrong come on up joe thanks governor i i wouldn't bet against that though the um it's about um but uh about half or so um have never received second visits um and the expectations that more staff would receive the vaccine on the second visit and that delta so far is 12 so 26 percent of staff received the vaccine on the first visit to the nursing homes and an additional 12 percent so far on what's happened for the second visits so the the running total all told is 38 of staff uptake and again that's with every nursing home having a first visit and about half having a second visit the residents you know we had about 69 percent take it on the first dose and some additional ones somewhere around eight to ten percent took it conditionally on the second pass as well about we have equal numbers roughly of confirmed cases and people who have received one shot not equal not equal more on the vaccine that's right uh but i guess roughly speaking we have you know 800 900 000 people with some degree of immunity now so i'm wondering at what point you know nothing counts people who didn't test positive at what point does this immunity start making indent in cases and hospitalizations and particularly as elderly people get the shot at what point can we expect to see that having an impact or do you think we're having an impact right now and that's why we're seeing lower cases and hospitalizations the question for those who didn't hear is um at what point do we think that the natural immunity that people get after a natural infection provides population-based benefit to us and i don't think we're there yet um and that's that's that's frustrating because i wish that we were it's just the facts on the ground don't don't argue that way in the course of this virus has been that it's been coming in waves and clearly we had a wave over the christmas and new year's time with increased travel and increased gatherings it was rather predictable and and now that's that that's going down just as it did during during the summer wave what we do know about natural infection is that it it very likely provides some degree of incomplete protection for some degree of time thereafter but to really specify how much protection and how long that lasts the jury is still somewhat out i mean there's there's data coming in slowly but it's not great data and i'll tell you um we absolutely are seeing some people get infected a second time and i've actually clinically now seen a couple people get infected a third time what the cdc says is you likely have some degree of protection following a natural infection for about 90 days but it's not all or nothing it doesn't mean that 91 days it all goes away and at 69 days or 89 days it's it's 100 protection it's nothing like that um at some point it weans and and that's been the nature of this outbreak without question there's benefit to people who had coveted already to get the vaccine when their time comes without question there's benefit to that it's possible that the amount of natural infection and now some degree of protection is providing some baseline level of protection in the community but i would not take much solace in that and and to the real practical question about what's coming ahead and the the governor has alluded to this or said it directly in in every press conference we've had the past month um the varrant is is circulating you know the best estimate from the cdc now is that the b-117 or the uk byron is doubling in numbers nationwide every 10 days and we know it's here we know it's here in much greater numbers and we're able to confirm just by virtue of how little genomic sequencing we do and we know it's going to grow so the message to folks in the community is we likely have more cases ahead and the focus now needs to be to drive down transmission as much as possible for as long as possible before we get into what might be another search because the more we drive it down now the better we're going to be set up to whether an additional surge if it comes thank you dr canner and and uh to underscore the importance of getting your vaccination even after you've had cobid i've got my secretary of department of transportation development here today to get uh his first vaccination dose um and he was he was one of the very first people in the state uh to be positive for for covet 19. uh we're gonna end the press conference now because i believe they started drawing doses over there and i'm i don't want to have any problems getting my vaccine i don't want to have any reason to delay it or heaven forbid any wastage or anything like that thank you all for continuing to to cover this uh it is is incredibly important that we actually communicate with the people of louisiana and that they get their information from reliable sources because there's too much misinformation out there and so i encourage everybody to get the vaccine when you can and even before and even after mask distance wash your hands and stay home when you're sick uh thank you all and we'll see you soon [Music] have you ever had a livestream [Applause] you should have done a few curls [Music] he did goodbye this is who knew your socks were gonna get judged i know i know see the mask is healthy i don't know whether [Music] thank you very much this is mine thank you all very much just making sure i don't want to be in your shot thank you no but i mean like i didn't want to be like in front you