Senior officials working with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and Operation Warp Speed are urging states to distribute a portion of their excess dose of COVID-19 vaccines to whomever they want, according to four people who is familiar with the matter.
The plan is already underway, with federal officials already talking to states about it. If introduced further, the shift in distribution could increase months of debate and strategies over who should get the vaccine first. But officials argue that this ‘first-come, first-served’ approach may be one of the only ways to ensure millions of doses of vaccine do not expire on the shelf. To date, 24 million doses have been assigned to states, with about 28 percent of the doses.
President Donald Trump once said that by the end of 2020, 100 million doses would be prepared. Recently, officials said they would administer 20 million doses by then. That did not happen. In mid-December, states began reporting a number of problems – delivery of doses that were delayed, and the vaccination system was shut down. And when the new year is over, the government has still not reached its target.
While administrative officials, citing everything from production and quality control inertia to conflict with the allocation of schedules, acknowledge that there was a slight backlog in bringing the first groups to states, they repeatedly told their local counterparts that distribution would soon would get back on track. Internally, however, in recent days, federal officials have become concerned that there are problems in every supply chain that could further delay the vaccination rate. A surprising number of health workers and frontline workers did not show up for their vaccinations or refused to get them. (According to a Los Angeles Times report, one hospital in northern California vaccinated less than half of its staff.) Refrigerators broke and spoiled dozens of doses. And states have struggled to find enough individuals to administer the vaccines.
“If there is a huge increase in cases and deaths after the December holidays, and we do not have the plan for the distribution of vaccines on course, we are in big trouble,” said a senior administration.
As part of discussions on how to quickly improve the distribution, officials at task force meetings, at intermediaries and during a Camp David summit on Tuesday suggested that states should distribute the vaccine – doses that may expire soon – to individuals who want to get vaccinated. These people will get the vaccine, even if they are not frontline health care workers, essential workers, older than 75 years old. There was no formal decision to draft recommendations in this way. Officials said they were not against states following this action, and told some local officials that they should accept the idea. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other top officials of Operation Warp Speed met in Camp David on Tuesday to discuss the next two weeks of the vaccination and the transition to the Biden administration.
“We need to make sure that the critically ill and most vulnerable people get this vaccine first,” said one senior administration official. “But if there are doses that just sit in refrigerators and expire, we need to get them there.”
‘We need to make sure that the critically ill and most vulnerable people get the vaccine first. But after that, if there are doses that just sit in refrigerators and expire, we need to get them there.”
– senior administration official
Senior officials working on the vaccine distribution process are adamant that it is not an option to inject vaccines, and that local officials should distribute it to anyone who wants it. According to officials, the question is how states regulate the process and keep track of who has been vaccinated, when they should receive their second doses, and whether the state has enough doses to ensure that each recipient receives both doses.
There are signs that individual hospitals and pharmacies are following the first-mate principle. On Monday, the news broke that the Giant pharmacy in Washington, DC had given a vaccine shot to someone walking through the store because the health workers who were planning to receive their shot did not show up. In Louisville, a couple was vaccinated at Walgreens on Christmas Eve after hearing that there were extras available. And a hospital in California gave away hundreds of doses to prison and nursing staff after the freezer went wrong.
“The release of the vaccine if it is not going to go unused … if it is thawed … we absolutely must get rid of these things,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. ‘I think local ingenuity is really important. It should be welcomed. You want convenience at a local level with money coming from the feds. ”
It’s all part of a broader discussion within the administration’s health institutions and among members of the White House task force on why the vaccine explosion was so bumpy. The vaccination effort would be complicated – it’s the biggest such campaign in American history – there was a bit of confusion from the beginning about exactly how much federal support they would receive in the administration process once Operation Warp The vaccine was sent quickly.
For federal government officials working on Operation Warp Speed, which oversees the distribution campaign, apparently no one can decide why vaccination rates nationwide are so low. Some officials said this is because states do not do their job of reporting people to appoint for their vaccinations. Others say that public education about the vaccination process and its effectiveness was unfortunately inadequate.
What’s more, each state experiences the spread of vaccination differently. Some states experience long lines of individuals showing up for their shots. Other states seem to be struggling to get the vaccines out of the freezer into people’s arms.
Officials in key government health agencies, including the CDC and HHS, say one of the biggest problems is the lack of an accurate and reliable vaccination system. One official said that some states ask individuals to report to the state and municipal databases after their vaccination to report that they have received their shots and that not all do so. Another official said there is no central reporting system that states can use to report their numbers to the CDC. CDC officials wanted to work more closely on the collection, collection and analysis of the data, but the White House and other senior health officials pushed back, one senior official said.
One senior official told The Daily Beast that as part of Camp David’s hour-long meeting Tuesday, officials discussed the need for states to distribute the vaccine to individuals outside the health care worker’s population if there are remaining doses. They have also drawn up a plan to work with states over the next two weeks to ensure that the vaccines are sent to pharmacies instead of healthcare departments or hospitals, to make the distribution process easier and more manageable. Operation Warp Speed officials hope to use the partnership with more than 19 pharmacy chains at 40.00 locations across the country to increase distribution by February.
The more urgent question, one senior administration official said, is how the Trump administration and the incoming Biden team are handling the vaccine hesitation. If individuals refuse to get the vaccine – especially frontline workers – it will take months longer to achieve widespread immunity through vaccination. To that end, individual members of the Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force in the White House have taken it upon themselves to speak to the media and appear virtually on private occasions to demonstrate the effectiveness of the vaccine.
HHS has also launched a campaign known as ‘Inent with Confidence’ to increase education on the issue. The aim of the campaign is to increase the safety of the vaccine – and the importance of slowing down the spread – in part through promotional videos and advertisements. A social media campaign in December entitled “Prepare the Nation” reached users on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. According to The Daily Beast’s HHS presentation, the campaign had 74 million impressions and 7 million video views as of last week.