By Sharon Bernstein
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) – Jerry Shapiro, a 78-year-old Los Angeles pharmacist, tops the list of Californians now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, but more than a month after the state with vaccinations started. , he must receive another.
Shapiro said he spent hours calling several health agencies and conducting fruitless computer searches, an experience many in the United States are familiar with as President Joe Biden’s days-old government runs around the country’s slow, chaotic vaccination. to work.
“Why not make it easy?” asks Shapiro, who is also worried about his wife due to medical conditions that will make her particularly vulnerable to the virus. “Keep it in your area. Make an appointment, take your chance and be ready.”
The United States is the country hardest hit by COVID-19, with 24.51 million cases and 409,987 deaths early Friday morning. More than 4,000 Americans died of the disease on Thursday for the second consecutive day.
Yet the deployment of vaccines, which left the administration of former President Donald Trump to the states to carry out without a federal blueprint or adequate funding, is awkward.
From California, where the distribution varied from country to country, to New York, where the largest city in the country has little supply, states and healthcare providers are struggling to procure, store and distribute vaccines.
“We are burning through our offer,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted Friday. “We need more doses IMMEDIATELY so we can protect the most vulnerable residents in our city. We need more doses so we can fight back.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said only 67% of New York City health workers received a dose of vaccine and warned that if the federal government could not find a way to increase production quickly, everyone below sal ly.
“The hospital workers are the people who, if they get sick, will collapse the capacity of the hospital,” Cuomo told a news conference. “If hospital capacity collapses, we need to shut down the economy.”
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said the state’s vaccination program had succeeded in getting 70% of the vaccine supply into people’s arms, but that a federal program in the state to help residents of nursing homes provided only 10% of spread the offer.
The country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, said on Friday that the federal government had placed too much of the responsibility for the distribution of the vaccine under state governments.
“States have done things that were clearly not the right direction – and that’s a shame,” Fauci told CNN.
Instead, he said, the government should work with the states to help them plan their implementation and make sure vaccines get into people’s arms.
DISTRIBUTION CHALLENGES
Less than half of the nearly 38 million doses of vaccine sent so far by the federal government have made it into the arms of Americans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday.
Some individual states were left with only a third or 40% of their vaccines administered as of Thursday, which was the one-year anniversary of the first locally transmissible COVID-19 case in the United States.
A major problem is organizing the distribution of vaccines to smaller clinics and pharmacies – rather than just to large medical centers and retail pharmaceutical chains.
In California, only a handful of independent pharmacies could obtain vaccination for their customers – usually only in rural areas where the big chain stores are not present, said Sonya Frausto, a pharmacist in the capital of Sacramento.
Shapiro, who owns an independent pharmacy in downtown Los Angeles, said customers call daily for vaccinations, but he should tell them he has no supplies.
He and his wife finally made appointments to receive a vaccine on Saturday, after repeated calls and hours were taken into account by health giant Kaiser Permanente. The Shapiros are not Kaiser members, but the nonprofit organization still offers them shots, Jerry Shapiro said.
In Sacramento, 65-year-old restaurateur Jami Goldstene will feel much safer in her public work if she can get a vaccine. She is technically eligible due to her age, but still needs to be offered an appointment – or even find a way to make an appointment – despite hours on the phone and on the internet.
“It’s very frustrating,” she said. “I want to be done with it. I want to feel safe again.”
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani in New York, Lisa Lambert in Washington, Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Tex., And Anurag Maan in Bengaluru; Edited by Frank McGurty and Matthew Lewis)