Who gets the COVID-19 vaccine first? Only 12 states follow CDC guidelines for order or priority

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that frontline health workers and residents of long-term care facilities include the first group of COVID-19 vaccinations.

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Next in line should be people over 75 and essential workers who do not need health care, including first responders, grocery stores, teachers and transportation workers, the CDC said.

The third group: people aged 65-74, and those between the ages of 16 and 64 with high risk medical conditions, and all essential workers not included in the first two groups.

But while all states follow the initial vaccinations to the letter, not every state thereafter adheres to these guidelines.

In fact, only 14 states adhere strictly to all of the CDC’s recommendations for who should be included in the second-tier priority group for vaccinations, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Most states included adults over 65 in this group.

And only 12 states (Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin) adhere to all of the CDC’s recommendations on the three priority levels.

“In some cases, states broaden and simplify the priority groups,” the report said. “But in other cases, states create new and more complex priority groupings.”

This could ‘lead to greater problems with the implementation of vaccine distribution plans and make it more difficult to communicate the plans to the public’, the report concluded.

“Access to COVID-19 vaccines in the first months of the U.S. vaccine campaign can depend a lot on where you live,” he added.

• 10 states contain additional first responders as those working directly in health (Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Virginia, and Wyoming).

• Four states add seniors to the first group of vaccinations, including people 65 and older (Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and West Virginia).

• In Utah, teachers and child care workers were among the first people to receive coronavirus vaccines, along with health workers and long-term caregivers. In neighboring states, teachers and child care workers have to wait several months to be vaccinated.

• Law enforcers and firefighters in ten states – Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Virginia and Wyoming – were included in the first-tier vaccination group.

• Tennessee includes people who cannot live independently and people over 75 in its first priority group.

• In Massachusetts and New Jersey, people who are locked up get priority access.

The Kaiser Family Foundation of KFF is a non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Related: Healthcare workers are supposed to get COVID-19 vaccines first – medical students, dentists and school nurses strive to be on the list

These differences are just a few examples of how different conditions assign early doses of the Pfizer PFE / BioNTech BNTX and Modern MRNA vaccines.

“The recommendations were made with a view to these goals: reduce death and serious illness as much as possible; to preserve the functioning of society; [and] reduces the extra burden that COVID-19 has on people who are already dealing with inequalities, ”says the CDC.

States are not expected to follow the committee’s recommendations, but health experts insist governors continue to adhere to ACIP’s recommendations, as this gives them a science-based framework to follow that could end the pandemic more quickly.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia first vaccinate health workers and long-term residents, as recommended by ACIP. But at least 16 countries are vaccinating other groups at the same time, according to an analysis published Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care brainstorm.

‘In some cases, states broaden and simplify the priority groups. But in other cases, states are creating new and more complex priority groupings, ”wrote the Kaiser Family Foundation researchers.

“As with many decisions on how best to respond to the pandemic, there are compromises here,” they added. “Identifying specific priority groups can focus more effectively on a limited amount of vaccines, but also lead to greater difficulties in implementing vaccine distribution plans and make it more difficult to communicate the plans to the public.”