Odessa Regional Medical Center received 400 doses of the Moderna vaccine on Monday, December 21 and began administering the vaccine to healthcare workers at 7:00 am on Tuesday morning. The hospital’s very first vaccine was given to Denise Mourning, who works as a nurse practitioner in ORMC’s dedicated COVID and critical care unit. All employee vaccinations were voluntarily received. More than 70 employees are scheduled to receive their vaccination today and several more are registered to receive it in the upcoming days.

“To be able to take this step feels like a piece of what we all need to do to make our world safe again, to get back to the life where we can see each other's faces,” said Rohith Saravanan, M.D., chief medical officer at Odessa Regional Medical Center.