💌 Do you like Philly? Sign up for the free Billy Penn Email to get everything you need to know about Philadelphia every day.
Although the Philly FEMA Vaccination Center at the Pennsylvania Convention Center is widely regarded as a success, it is still figuring out how to best distribute the remaining COVID-19 vaccine during its 6,000 daily appointments. .
According to Department of Health spokesman Jim Garrow, the Center City Vaccination Center, as it is called, is completed every day with a turnout rate of between 4% and 11% – meaning between 230 and 660 doses at the end of every day.
During the first week of the clinic, workers at the site used an ad hoc situation to get the surplus into people’s arms.
One way was via telephone invitations on the same day, where the Department of Health calls suitable persons registered in the register of vaccine interests to see if they can come to the site immediately. If people say yes, they get a waiting code to use when they arrive, so line staff at the clinic know they have been invited.
“We monitor daily surveys and estimate how many unused doses will be at the end of the day,” Garrow said to know how many people are calling.
Even after the last-minute invitations, not all of the remaining doses are spoken for, and some of the vaccines will be eligible for Philly residents who simply arrive and wait at the end of the day.
“We tell people it’s not a clinic, but if we still have appointments left, our staff will go out and immediately examine the people who are there,” Garrow said. “They have to prove they live in Philadelphia, and they have to prove they’re in 1A or 1B.”
Officials are currently formalizing a process to distribute the remaining doses in a fair and equitable manner, Garrow said. To fill vacancies, officials will first contact community vaccine distributors to see if they need to fill additional spaces. If there are still remains at the end of the day, it will be possible to walk in, but that is never guaranteed, he said.
Some line staff at the conference center gave mixed messages to the hopefuls.
Philly chef Ange Branca, who is of Malaysian descent, posted on Instagram this past weekend about her experience securing a residual vaccine. As a member of the restaurant industry, Branca meets the requirements of Phase 1B for essential workers. But when she showed up and asked to get one of the unused doses, she was almost sent home without waiting for a shot.
She kept going and asked another worker and eventually led to join a predominantly white row of people who told her they had been given the green light to wait. ‘
“It occurred to me that I initially refused to access the vaccine based on my skin color,” Branca wrote in an open letter to the health department she posted on Instagram. “It bothered me badly that the others in the queue by the marines at the entrance were instructed to do it right, while they gave me false information and turned me away.”
Garrow said officials received the letter from Branca, and immediately reviewed the procedures with line staff to make sure all heaps were treated the same. He also apologized.
“It is our hope that the situation that Ange was forced to face is simply a matter of a line staff not being up to date with the latest procedures and nothing more, and we apologize for being misdirected,” he said. Garrow told Billy Penn. .
The city is trying to close the racial gap between vaccine recipients – and that’s part of the reason why officials want to scare the crowd off after hours. The waiting line tends to be younger and whiter, Garrow said.
The health department listed three main reasons that doses are unused:
- Residents with non-Philadelphia zip codes who have somehow made an appointment will be canceled immediately.
- Other people have given different reasons for cancellation – and sometimes people just do not show up
- Some people with appointments end up not getting vaccinated due to medical conditions, such as a possible allergic reaction
Word quickly spread about the remaining dosage offer on the FEMA website, attracting ineligible people to the Center City Vaccination Center which was eventually just turned away.
And just as the login links of the appointment are widely distributed, despite strict instructions not to share them with friends or family, the same happens with the waiting codes on the same day, which gives the user the right to an ‘orange ticket’ way to get the jab.
“I think it would be naive to believe that these passwords are not shared,” Garrow said, but health department employees reminded people not to share them. ‘It’s an extreme balance,’ he added, aiming to give vaccines to ‘more people, but more of the priority people. ”