On Jan. 23, Nicholls State University partnered with Fletcher Technical Community College to vaccinate nursing and allied health students and faculty.   

Communications Director Jerad David emailed students on Friday afternoon informing them that COVID-19 vaccinations were to be administered on campus over the weekend.

As of Tuesday morning, David said that everything went extremely well and that the vaccination process went smoothly.

“We were very happy with the outcome,” David said.

David said that 267 vaccines were administered over the weekend. The event consisted of four separate sessions. Three on Saturday and one on Sunday for qualifying individuals.

Those individuals were qualified nursing and allied health students, first responders in the community and faculty and staff that are 70 or older. The nursing and allied health students that qualified are those who are currently working in healthcare, such as nursing students who are in clinicals.

“We’ve actually gotten some praise from the folks in Baton Rouge and Region 3 Louisiana Department of Health for how smoothly and quickly we were able to dispense that number of vaccines,” David said.

David said the Nicholls community began planning an on-campus vaccination a couple of weeks ago when they found out they had the capacity to house the vaccines on campus. David said they utilized the freezers in the Nicholls biology department to keep the doses at the correct temperature.

The vaccine that was administered on campus over the weekend was the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. According to the Pfizer website, the vaccine doses need to be stored in 2-8° Celsius conditions until use.

David said part of the planning process was identifying how many people would fall into the qualifying group on campus so they could make sure to order the correct amount of vaccine doses from the LDH. 

“The week leading up to the vaccine included lots of meetings and planning to get all the wrinkles worked out,” David said.

David said all of the attention to detail in the planning process allowed the weekend to go smoothly. He also said that there were no instances of anyone experiencing distress about receiving the vaccine.

David also spoke of the significance of the collaboration between Nicholls and Fletcher for the event.

“We were the first four-year and two-year collaboration in the state,” David said. “We were also among the first schools in the state without a Medical School or a health center to qualify for vaccine administration.”

David said that the vaccine will be more widely available to others on campus and the community in the future. He said that when we move into the next phase more people will qualify to receive the vaccine, such as Nicholls’ retirees and their spouses, but he doesn’t expect students to qualify for it until the fall semester.