A flawed vaccine rollout
While it should be finally crystal clear to all but the dullest minds that the Great Distraction currently occupying the White House is made of the stuff to be scraped off the bottom of our shoes, we’ve got to hand him this: He knows how to take our attention off the pandemic.
What a price to pay for that. Although as it turns out, the compelling theatrics of a Qanon shaman in full costume stalking the halls of Congress afford a lucky turn for our esteemed governor. While everyone is looking down there in Washington where the light is brighter, up here in New York the much anticipated rollout of the state COVID-19 vaccination program is off to a rip roaring mew. A stuttering, disappointing start, moving at a crawl when we should be doing a sprint.
A far cry from the New York exceptionalism recognized in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s awardwinning handling of the initial pandemic tsunami. To be fair, New York is neither the best nor the worst of the various state efforts, but somewhere in the middle. Although such a ranking is surely not worthy of gubernatorial poster art.
I am confident that will change. After appointing hospitals as vaccination hubs for health care professionals and nursing home patients and staff, he’s threatened them with $100,000 fines if they don’t pick up the pace. A typical Cuomo incentive. Remember, these same hospitals are overwhelmed by the pandemic surge and a new, more contagious strain.
His frustration at the slowness is evident, and he has cause. It is, after all, the failure of the federal government to have a plan in place right down to the vaccinations in every arm that is at the heart of the state’s dilemma. Yet the current federal administration’s track record for this sort of failure at followthrough is well established from the earliest responses to the pandemic, and the state should have anticipated where we are and been better prepared. Now we have to catch up. We will.
President-elect Joe Biden has assured us greatly improving the federal pipeline is high on his agenda, including bringing critically needed resources for states to set up the tens of thousands of inoculation centers ultimately required down in the trenches.
On Thursday, the governor’s COVID task force finally gave some reassurance that soon county health departments, which have long been the established providers of grass-roots public health in this state, would be back in the game as leading rather than bit players. For reasons that still make no sense, the governor had decided on his alternative hospital hub system instead, but now we’re back to the original game plan. In his
unyielding need to control, sometimes the governor just can’t get out of his own way.
Even a more graphic example of that is an ill-advised overreaction of an executive order he issued Dec. 28. Prior to that, some health clinic in Brooklyn allegedly fraudulently obtained a bunch of COVID-19 vaccine, which prompted the governor to put his foot down hard and proclaim that any out of order vaccination could bring a $1 million fine and professional license revocation.
The governor was sternly warding off fraud. Except, the chilling effect this order has had on the broader health care community is enormously unhelpful for creating the many portals to vaccination New York is going to need to make this work.
Recently I spoke to my physician, who has a large and wellestablished practice in the area, and asked him when I could get my vaccine shot. His office is where I often get my yearly flu shot. “It won’t be here,” he said. The plain language of the governor’s executive order was cited. It was too great a risk for his practice to inadvertently give the wrong person a shot, with no exception offered for operating in good faith. He predicted many other physicians would have similar feelings.
What this has also led to is the potential for having to destroy this short-shelf life vaccine rather than give it to someone out of the arcane order the state has set up. That has already happened in Albany County. Which is insane given that state allocations are still way below what was promised even as many New Yorkers are in anxous need regardless of which phase they’re in.
Rensselaer County Executive Steve Mclaughlin made a related point to the COVID task force Thursday, that until this chokehold is taken off, maximum use of the vaccines available will not happen. The governor needs to rewrite that executive order or deep six it entirely. It’s just plain dumb. And while he’s about it, he should simplify his five-phase rollout plan that is both complicated and ambivalent.
From the public’s perspective, the greatest failure of the vaccine rollout so far is communication, or the utter lack of it. County leaders made this point to the COVID task force. And anyone trying to find out, as I have, when and where they can get a vaccine shot knows whereof I write. Good luck to that.