I hate it to carry the bad news, but 2021 will not be as different from 2020 if the country (and the world in that respect) does not get its vaccine deal.
As Britain moves forward with a dubious strategy of mix different vaccine products, the new type of COVID-19 first reported in the UK was found in Colorado and California this week, and Los Angeles is still grappling with a devastating surge of coronavirus cases.
Despite the clearly still active distribution of COVID-19, the hope released in the form of two highly effective vaccines at the end of 2020 is now tempered by a tangle of deployment issues.
Although more than 14 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been shipped to the US, reports the New York Times that only about 2 million people even received a first dose. The federal government has set a goal of vaccinating against 20 million people by 2020, but that has been a long way to go and there is no single or clear answer as to why.
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Officials in the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed have suggested that the holiday season could affect vaccination efforts, while Trump blame it individual states for the slow rollout. In December, several state governors called the federal government to send fewer vaccine doses to their regions than promised.
But an issue affecting the use of the vaccines could also be the reluctance of health workers to be placed first in line to get protection against COVID-19. Both the LA Times and NPR reported that frontline workers in hospitals in California and Chicago, respectively, succumbed to vaccination.
In Riverside County, California, nearly 50% of eligible health care professionals have refused the vaccine. While some refusal has come from pregnant front-line workers who are wary of taking the vaccine (the Center for Disease Control says there are limited data on the safety of vaccines given to pregnant or breastfeeding women), others avoid doses due to fear as well as mistrust in government.
“This is not shocking, given what the federal government has been doing for the past ten months,” Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told the LA Times.
In a survey in December three out of ten health workers carried out by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they would “probably or definitely” not be vaccinated.
Then there are the incidents of health professionals deliberately sabotaging vaccines or bulging the distribution of doses among those actively seeking it.
In Tennessee, WRCB 3 News Releases that Hamilton County health department officials on Friday pointed to numerous people who had been lined up in their cars for hours and in turn waited for a vaccine shot with limited supplies. Later in the day, it was found that officials at the health department were distributing doses to ‘close contacts’, ie people who were friends and relatives of those who administered the vaccine.
And on New Year’s Eve, police arrested a pharmacist working at Advocate Aurora Health Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
According to a statement by Grafton police, who arrested the worker this week but have not yet named him, 57 doses of the spoiled vaccine were administered to patients. Although hospital officials said there were no health problems with receiving the destroyed vaccines, the worker wrote a statement acknowledging that he had deliberately spoiled the doses by taking them out of the refrigerator. According to police, he also knew that people who received the destroyed doses would think they were protected from the virus if they were not.
The suspect has yet to be formally charged, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel identified The 46-year-old Steven Brandenburg, a licensed pharmacist, is being jailed under the preliminary charges set out by Grafton police in his statement on the arrest.
President-elect Biden has a big battle ahead of him as he takes over the White House and the ongoing battle against the coronavirus pandemic, the chief of which is getting more public on board with a joint response to protect ourselves from the disease.