There is no reason for the slow rolling out or doses not being used; experts believe it would never be easy to launch a mass vaccination campaign during a pandemic. It takes time to vaccinate and monitor a large number of people, and some facilities surprise staff vaccinations to prevent too many health workers from being out of service at the same time.
The supply and demand are not always in line. Some groups with the highest priority – health workers and residents of long-term care institutions – do not want the vaccine yet, or at least do not yet. At the same time, the American Medical Association said Friday that it is “concerned” that some health care workers who do not work at hospitals or health care systems are having difficulty accessing the vaccine.
To speed up the process, the federal government is appealing to states to offer the vaccine to people who are older or in higher risk groups, but some areas still focus on the top priority groups – even if it means doses brought out of the cold. word. storage goes unused.
“Every dose that is in someone’s arm is someone who’s not going to get sick with Covid,” he said. “It does not help to ration the week so week, because every dose that sits in a refrigerator is a life that cannot potentially be saved.”
Looking for people to vaccinate
It begins Monday, when New York will open for first responders, teachers and residents 75 years and older, in addition to the health workers.
Frustration has already increased. Last week Tuesday night, nurses from the Family Health Center of Harlem in New York traveled through the area to find people who are eligible to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.
The health center had a few extra doses of the Moderna vaccine taken from the cold room. The doses were supposed to be given to health workers – but some did not show up for their appointments, and the bell rang.
“It expires six hours after you take the first dose out of the vial,” Calman said.
That evening, the nurses ‘went out into the community and they went to two open pharmacies and asked if any of the pharmacists who were there wanted the vaccine,’ Calman said. “They went to a firehouse in the street to see if any of the people in the firehouse needed vaccine … They went to a residential facility.”
By the end of the evening, there were still ‘three to four’ doses left and it was discarded, Calman said.
“We need to maintain the priority levels – I think it’s very important to have healthcare workers first, and to be able to bring in teachers now and others,” Calman said. “But over time, the healthcare provider must be able to vaccinate our patients at the highest risk, and be able to use our professional judgment in terms of who those people are and for whom we can vaccinate.”
“We expect these issues to be worked out”
Across the country, Legacy Health, a non-profit healthcare system with six hospitals in Oregon and southwest Washington, confirmed to CNN on Friday that 27 doses of Pfizer / BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine were discarded during its early vaccination efforts last month because they had expired. before there was time to get them in the arms – and some initial information about the vaccine was unclear.
Brian Terrett, a spokesman for Legacy Health, said in an email to CNN that hospitals under Legacy Health had scheduled vaccinations based on initial information, provided that each bottle of vaccine contained five doses. Some vials appear to contain six or seven doses – and at the time hospitals had extra doses, but no one was scheduled or available to prescribe them.
“The 27 doses that expired occurred early in our vaccination effort when we had more vaccines than patients,” Terrett said. “If we had six or seven doses in a vial, we could vaccinate nearly 700 more people than we were assigned. For every vaccine that expired, Legacy vaccinated nearly 25 more people than we expected.”
As nationwide reports of Covid-19 vaccines are unused at some hospitals, the American Hospital Association responded in a statement that it expects these issues to be worked out.
The association represents and serves U.S. hospitals and health care networks.
“U.S. hospitals and healthcare systems are working hard to deliver COVID-19 vaccines as quickly and safely as possible, and do so as prescribed in the micro-plan of their state or local jurisdiction,” said Rick Pollack, president and CEO of AHA, in a statement to CNN by email. on Friday.
“At the same time, we continue to care for a large number of COVID-19 patients under very stressful conditions which include PPE deficiencies, work shortages and limited ICU bed capacity in certain areas. Mass vaccination is a large and complicated process – and not unlike with any other attempt of this nature – there are always bumps in the direction of any major government effort, especially in the beginning, ‘Pollack said in part. “We expect these issues to be worked out, and the rate of vaccinations will increase in the coming weeks. dramatically increased. “
Slow rollout in long-term care facilities
Vaccinations for residents and staff for long-term care institutions are also moving slowly in many places. As of Friday morning, more than 4 million doses had been distributed for use in long-term care settings, but fewer than 700,000 eligible individuals had received their first dose.
The federal government has partnered with CVS and Walgreens to facilitate vaccination in participating long-term care facilities.
In a statement published on Wednesday, CVS said that the number of residents needing vaccination is 20-30% lower than the initial forecasts, and that the “initial survey among staff is low”, but this may be due to fascinating facilities among staff.
Walgreens, meanwhile, told CNN that any unused doses in a long-term care facility will be allocated to the next scheduled clinic, and any doses that may expire before then can be used to vaccinate the Walgreens team members who are eligible to receive vaccines. as part of the Phase 1a plan set out and declared by the CDC. “
Western Virginia leads the United States in vaccine doses administered per capita, and long-term care facilities may be part of the reason. West Virginia was the only participant to select the federal program to distribute the Covid-19 vaccine among long-term care staff and residents; it started vaccinating people in those facilities about a week before the federal program began in other states.
More than 40% of pharmacies in West Virginia are not affiliated with the chain, and the state wants to prioritize existing relationships, the governor told a news conference Dec. 16.
“We’d rather worked with all the pharmacies in West Virginia,” Judge Jim Justice said in December. “We felt that from a state perspective, it would limit our ability to quickly distribute the vaccine and administer it to the population in need if we were to go along with the federal program.”
CNN’s Deidre McPhillips, Laura Ly and Naomi Thomas contributed to this report.