TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) – Terry Beth Hadler was so eager to get a life-saving COVID-19 vaccine that the 69-year-old piano teacher lined up in a parking lot with hundreds of other senior citizens overnight.
She will not do it again.
Hadler said she waited 14 hours and that a fight broke out almost before dawn on Tuesday when people outside Bonita Springs, Florida, cut along the rope, where officials gave shots on a first-base basis to 65- jariges. .
“I’m afraid the event was a super-distributor,” she said. “I was petrified.”
The race to vaccinate millions of Americans is starting slower and more messy than public health officials and leaders of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed expected.
Overworked, underfunded public health departments are scrambling to put together vaccine plans. Provinces and hospitals followed different approaches, leading to long queues, confusion, frustration, and stuck phone lines. A multitude of logistical concerns have the process of trying to complicate the plague that killed more than 340,000 Americans.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking for patience and notes that the vaccine supply is limited.
‘It may not be for everyone today, maybe not next week. “During the next few weeks, we will have the opportunity to get it, as long as we continue to get the stock,” he said on Wednesday.
Florida has given priority to residents 65 and older to receive the vaccine as soon as medical workers and long-term caregivers and staff get the chance. The decision gives a proposal from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to give priority to people aged 75 and older and essential workers such as teachers and first reactions as the next to be vaccinated.
Dr. Ashish Jha, a health policy researcher and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said the biggest problem is that states do not receive adequate financial or technical support from the federal government. Jha said the Trump administration, primarily the Department of Health and Human Services, had instituted states to fail.
‘There are still many states to do,’ he said, ‘but you need a much more active role of the federal government than they were willing to do. They largely told states: ‘It is your responsibility. Postpone it. ‘”
Vaccination backlog reports partly explain why many states are not meeting their year-end goals, but officials blame logistical and financial barriers to the slow pace.
Many states do not have the money to hire staff, pay overtime, or reach out to the public. The equipment needed to keep the vaccines cold complicates their distribution. Suppliers should also track vaccinations so that they have enough to dispense the required second doses 21 days after the first dose.
Dr. James McCarthy, executive physician at Memorial Hermann in Houston, said the hospital system has administered about half of the approximately 30,000 doses it has received since Dec. 15.
The system had to draw up a plan in advance. Among other things, administrators had to ensure that everyone in the vaccination areas could distance themselves socially, and they had to build in a period of 15 minutes for each patient so that the recipients could be monitored for any side effects.
“We can’t just hand it out like candy,” McCarthy said.
Pasadena, California, vaccinates its firefighters in groups of 50 after their two-day shifts expire, allowing them to recover during their four-day free time. “We do not want the majority of our staff – if they experience side effects – to be all at once,” said City spokeswoman Lisa Derderian.
In South Carolina, state lawmakers are asking why the state administered only 35,158 of the 112,125 Pfizer doses it received on Wednesday. State Sen. Marlon Kimpson said officials told him some prominent health workers did not want to be vaccinated while others were on vacation.
Lin Humphrey, a university professor whose 81-year-old mother lives with him in a high-rise apartment in Miami, said it took him about 80 calls to call someone at a Miami Beach hospital that began vaccinating the elderly last week. has. .
“It reminded me of the ’80s where you had to call a radio station to be the 10th caller to get concert tickets,” Humphrey said. “When I finally got through, I was crying over the phone with the woman.”
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday set an ambitious goal to vaccinate 1 million residents – a task he said would require foreign cooperation and dramatically increase access to the shots.
Over the past few weeks, Trump administration health officials have been talking about a goal to send enough vaccine by the end of the month to vaccinate 20 million Americans. But it is unclear whether the US will reach that point.
Army General Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, said on Wednesday that 14 million doses had been sent across the country so far. Detection by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention showed that nearly 2.8 million injections were given as of Wednesday.
Officials said there has been a delay in reporting vaccinations, but it is still happening more slowly than expected. Perna predicted the pass would pick up next week.
“We agree that the number is lower than we had hoped for,” said Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientist of Warp Speed, said.
Elected president Joe Biden said Tuesday that the Trump administration has “fallen far behind” and promised to increase the pace as soon as he takes office on January 20. In early December, Biden promised to distribute 100 million shots in the first 100 days. of its administration.
Jha said Biden’s goal is ambitious but achievable.
“It’s not going to be easy if they have infrastructure on January 20 that is not ready to run on Day One,” he said.
In Tennessee, health officials had hoped to reach a goal of issuing 200,000 doses by the end of the year, but delays in delivery could prevent that from happening. Health officials said the state received 20,300 doses on Tuesday that were expected to arrive last week.
“We just could not do anything about it,” said Dr. Lisa Piercey, Tennessee health commissioner, said.
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Kunzelman reported from College Park, Maryland. Associated Press reporters John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia; Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles; Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City; Lauran Neergaard in Alexandria, Virginia; Marion Renault in Rochester, Minnesota; Michael Schneider in Orlando, Florida; Desiree Mathurin in Atlanta; and Michelle Liu in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.