MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP - The Michigan National guard will deploy 975 doses of the Moderna vaccine to the Michigan State Police.

Last week, the Ingham County Health Department (ICHD) received 1,700 doses of the Moderna vaccine instead of the 1,950 doses of Pfizer vaccines that they were expecting.

“We have a mass clinic operation going on at the pavilion where we have never had anything other than Pfizer vaccine in there. Due to concerns about potential clinical error, we were really trying to keep it [Moderna vaccine] out of that area,” said Vail.

The Michigan National Guard and the ICHD agreed that they will use 975 doses of the Moderna vaccine for MSP and the 975 doses of Pfizer that was allocated to the MSP will now be used to vaccinate residents of Ingham County.

The Michigan National Guard will have more mobility when administering the Moderna vaccine because it can be used for 30 days after it is removed from the temperature it's stored at. While the Pfizer vaccine can only be used for five days after it is removed from the temperature it’s stored at.

“We caught it just before we were going to have to start using that Moderna vaccine and figuring out how to do all of that caution to make sure nothing happened in terms of an error,” said Vail.

As a result of the shipment of Moderna vaccine, Vail also said that they plan on using the shipment of doses they received this week to administer the additional 1,000 vaccines that are scheduled throughout the end of this week.

Since December 17, 2020, ICHD has received over 15,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. 11,000 of those doses have already been administered and an additional 1,000 doses are expected to be administered by the end of the week.

Although there are still people in Phase 1 group A that need to be vaccinated, ICHD has moved on to vaccinating some of group B. This group includes law enforcement, firefighters, K-12 school teachers and people age 70 and older.

Vail was instructed on Tuesday not to begin vaccinating group C, which is people ages 16-64 years old with underlying health conditions. She clarified that ICHD is still receiving the same allocations of vaccines as they were before even though they aren’t vaccinating Phase 1 Group C yet.