Get your shot ... next year
Feds need to pick up the pipeline pace for vax, top Bay State doc warns
Many Bay Staters won’t be vaccinated until next year unless the feds step up with supplying doses to the state, the head of the Massachusetts Medical Society is warning.
At the current slow pace, it would take about 80 weeks to get enough people vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, estimated Dr. David Rosman, the president of the Massachusetts Medical Society.
“The state is ready to give out shots,” Rosman told the Herald Wednesday. “We need the federal government to step up with its supply.”
The state now ranks 41st in the nation for administering coronavirus vaccines, according to CDC data.
With Johnson & Johnson poised to produce 100 million doses by the summer, Rosman said he’s confident that the pace will accelerate and people won’t need to wait a year to get vaccinated.
“I’m very hopeful that by the fall, enough of the population will have been vaccinated to get us to herd immunity,” he said. “The Biden administration was dealt a bad hand, but they need to do everything in their power to get the vaccine out faster.”
Residents across the state have been questioning why they can’t get a shot, Rosman said.
“People wondered at first whether it was because the state can’t give them fast enough, but the real answer is the federal government can’t get them to the state fast enough,” he said.
As of Wednesday, more than 600,000 total doses have been administered in Massachusetts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That breaks down to 497,445 people receiving at least one dose, and 126,560 people receiving both doses.
The feds have distributed 1.1 million total doses to Massachusetts, according to the CDC. In last week’s state Department of Public Health report, 107,525 doses were shipped to the state in the previous seven days.
Gov. Charlie Baker at a Wednesday press conference said governors have been pushing the Biden administration for more visibility about what’s coming down the pipeline in terms of vaccines.
“We would really like to see two to three weeks’ worth of visibility into the supply chain, and they have said to us that is something they are going to seek to do, but at this time we are still playing the one-week game,” Baker said.
The governor added that he’s “not happy with where we are” with the vaccine rollout.
“I know a lot of other people aren’t (happy) either,” he said. “We have work to do and we know that. One of the best things a good manager does is recognizes and understands that they have a problem, and then bust their butt to figure out how to fix it.”
Massachusetts Democratic Party Chair Gus Bickford called it “embarrassing” that the state ranks 41st.
“Where is the vaccine call center that should have been up and running weeks ago?” Bickford said in a statement. “We shouldn’t have to expect mediocrity, at best, from our Governor. And there is no reason, aside from incompetence, why Massachusetts would rank 41st in vaccine distribution.”