“The more rules we create, the more fines we impose, the fewer vaccines are delivered,” former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Monday. “That’s the conclusion.”
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has spent weeks insisting that only health workers can get the shots, even though many people have refused, and have only begun to ease restrictions in recent days. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has put together extensive expert committees to weigh up complicated rules for distribution, which have fixed the effort in bureaucratic confusion.
The competitors sent 1.2 million doses to New York, but less than half a million people got a chance, according to the CDC’s vaccine detection. California has sent nearly 2.5 million doses to local health departments and health care systems, but just over 783,400 vaccinations have been administered. Elected President Joe Biden set the formidable goal of injecting 100 million doses during his first 100 days in office.
“Pharmacists are trying to do the right thing, and they know how important it is not to let vaccines go to waste,” said Mitchel Rothholz, the American Pharmacists Association Immunization Policy Guide. “But if we also have discussions in California and New York, they should know that their backs are covered when they make a statement.”
The slow and cumbersome response of states comes after the federal government offered little support to governors, both in terms of policy direction and strengthening on the ground. Leaders have been left to make important decisions about distribution on their own, while facing worse problems, such as a shortage of labor and funding issues that will continue until the nearly $ 9 billion approved by Congress to help distribute vaccines spread.
Other states have weakened their rules or tried different strategies to protect against wasting shots. New Jersey and the District of Columbia, for example, explicitly allow pharmacies and other suppliers to give unused vaccines to the public on a first-come, first-served basis.
And in West Virginia, where officials have discussed the federal distribution framework for vaccinating nursing homes and attendees and staff in favor of their own network of largely independent pharmacies, everyone over the age of 80 has already had their first shot – and nursing home residents are starting to their second. The state has also begun immunizing schools and colleges. Although it is a sparsely populated rural state that faces direct comparisons with larger urban states, West Virginia has fired nearly 90,000 of the 126,000 shots it has received.
While officials in New York and California received the most heat for their restrictive rules, few states escaped criticism for their cumbersome rollout.
Virginia, for example, is struggling to keep up with distribution, in part because suppliers do not know how to see if someone is eligible, reports Richmond Times-Dispatch. Observers at the slow deployment of Maryland – where two counties have barely used one of their allotted doses and even Baltimore City is still sitting on most of its shots – have also made the theory that contemplative prioritization is part of the problem.
But across the spectrum from New York and California, Florida has relaxed its rules for giving the vaccine to anyone over the age of 65 – and now faces a flood of older adults who have been excluded from the vaccine in their home countries to get, stream to the holiday destination. The subsequent free-for-all causes long queues and a lot of confusion, although it highlights the barriers for seniors in the rest of the country to be immunized.
The local contrasts only add to the pressure on leaders of the campaigns who are performing poorly to increase their efforts.
“We need to follow CDC protocols, and if the state has doses that are going to expire, give them to anyone you can, before they become useless,” said Jordan Cunningham, a Republican. “Pretty simple.”
Cuomo, a Democrat, began to respond to growing pressure.
On Monday, the first responders, teachers, and adults over the age of 75 in New York began receiving their first doses of Covid-19 vaccines, days after Cuomo reversed his policy of discussing doses for health care workers. The governor has further announced a new Public Health Corps to speed up vaccine delivery in New York as part of its 2021 priorities.
“We would rather have people turn in and wait for the vaccine, than have the vaccine wait on people,” Cuomo said during Monday’s speech, virtually from the state Capitol.
Despite much praise for his early handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cuomo has faced increasing pressure from state lawmakers and local leaders over his grip on vaccine distribution. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has repeatedly urged Cuomo to expand vaccinations outside the initial priority group, has threatened to abandon state rules and start vaccinating essential workers.
“The state must repent here,” the Democratic mayor said Friday before Cuomo updated the state’s vaccine policy. “They have created a situation that creates fear and confusion and where doctors cannot act, even if they know someone is vulnerable.”
New York State officials, meanwhile, warn that state “use or lose” policies, along with announced fines for providers who consciously assign doses, only contribute to the confusion. They also insisted on opening vaccinations for first responders and elderly residents. Such concerns were not lost on state legislators.
“The launch of the vaccine has been extremely disappointing,” Democrat New York Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins told reporters Monday.
In California, where officials set up a working group and a 60-member advisory committee to try to justify distribution, Newsom on Monday rebuffed criticism that these efforts slowed the process.
“We are not losing sight of the issue of equity, nor are we losing sight of the need to prioritize the most vulnerable and essential,” the Democratic governor told reporters.
California officials last week tried to organize ways to dispense doses – a problem that came to the fore when a broken freezer compressor at a hospital in Northern California forced staff to deliver the 830 thawed doses as quickly as possible and members from outside the state’s guidelines to prevent the vaccine from going bad.
Newsom acknowledged that its current strategy ‘will not get us where we need to go’ as fast as it needs to. But he set himself the goal of vaccinating another 1 million people by this weekend, for a total of more than 1.4 million vaccinations across the country. To get there, he offered massive vaccination sites, and extended the vaccination of vaccines to other levels than their vaccinations in the current phase, and expanded the health workers authorized to administer the vaccine.