It’s been a busy start to vaccinating children against COVID-19 around the Capital Region.

“It’s a very exciting thing now to have this COVID-19 vaccine available,” said Dr. Michael Looney of Delmar Pediatrics. “We’ve had an overwhelming response from parents with this.”

Pediatricians like Looney say the shots are in high demand.

“I spent two hours Thursday morning just answering phones with the front office staff because the phones have not stopped ringing,” he said.

The office received a batch of 300 shots and is already close to running out. He’s expecting several hundred more by the end of the week.

“There are families that haven’t been able to see their grandparents, haven’t been able to see their loved ones because they have little ones at homes,” he said. “They have kids also going off to school and coming and the younger kids, they’re not immunized.”

Preparing the shots is a tedious process.

“When you mix this vaccine, it comes to room temperature, you have to rotate it ten times,” he explained. “Then you inject into it dilution. You again rotate it ten times. Then you draw it.”

Between testing, the cold season and now vaccines, pediatricians across the country have been slammed.

But Looney says he couldn’t be happier to have a vaccine to offer his patients.

“I think busy would be an inadequate word to use,” he said. “Overwhelmed, titanic, tsunami. I had parents with tears in their eyes that they were so glad they could vaccinate their kids.”