Tight vaccine supply creates reluctance over federal sites
OKLAHOMA CITY — The Biden administration’s plan to open 100 vaccination sites by the end of the month was initially embraced by governors and health officials, who considered it a much needed lifeline to get more Americans inoculated against the coronavirus.
But reality has quickly set in: Some are hesitating to take the offer, at least for now, saying they don’t need more places to administer doses. They just need more doses.
Eager to protect more people against the coronavirus, health officials in Oklahoma jumped at the chance to add large, federally supported vaccination sites. They wanted them in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and a third, mid-size city, Lawton, thinking the extra help would allow them to send more doses to smaller communities.
“We felt like if we could get them in the metro areas, what that would allow us to do is … free up a lot of our other resources to do more targeted vaccinations in underserved areas,” said state Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed.
Those plans are now on hold after the state learned that the sites would not come with additional vaccines. Instead, the doses would have to be pulled from the state’s existing allocation, and the three sites alone might have used more than half of Oklahoma’s vaccine supply.
“We’re not prepared to pull the trigger on it unless it comes with vaccine,” Reed said.
The Biden administration’s virus response plan calls for opening 100 federally supported vaccination sites by the end of February. It is preparing to mobilize thousands of staffers and contractors from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. They already have been providing money, staffing or logistical support for many state and local vaccination efforts, but President Joe Biden’s plan specifically refers to launching new sites to help get vaccines to underserved communities.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain touted the initiative earlier this month after initial sites were announced in Los Angeles and Oakland. The administration has since announced a handful of others.
“We just opened our first two federal vaccination centers, in California this week,” Klain told NBC News. “We’re on our way to 100 of them by the end of this month.”
The White House could not provide a tally showing how many of the 100 new sites had been announced so far, but said it’s confident it will hit its goal by the end of the month.
Getting Americans vaccinated will be key to suppressing the virus and fully reopening the economy. So far, just over 46 million doses have been administered and the administration has pledged to ramp up daily doses to 1.5 million. Since the pandemic began nearly a year ago, more than 27 million Americans have been infected and the country is on the cusp of reaching 500,000 deaths.
Lack of adequate supplies across the country has led to canceled appointments, shuttered mega sites and the halting of first doses to ensure people can get second shots. Governors have said consistently over the past two weeks that their biggest need isn’t a new distribution system, it’s just getting more vaccine.
“It’s not necessary in Florida,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said of the large federally supported sites. “I would take all that energy and I would put that toward more supply of the vaccine.”
Hesitancy over adding more vaccination centers without a significant increase in vaccines is coming from some of Biden’s biggest supporters. That includes some Democratic governors who roundly criticized the Trump administration’s decision to delegate much of the pandemic response to the states.
ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wrote a book on managing the COVID-19 crisis. Now he faces intensifying accusations that he covered up the true death toll of the pandemic on nursing home residents, attacks that challenge his reputation for straight-shooting competency and could cloud his political future.
State lawmakers called for investigations, stripping Cuomo of his emergency powers and even his resignation after new details emerged this week about why certain nursing home data was kept under wraps for months, despite requests from lawmakers and others.
Top aide Melissa DeRosa told lawmakers the data was delayed because officials worried that the information was “going to be used against us” by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice.
The new salvos from Republicans and Cuomo’s fellow Democrats mark a stark turnaround from early days of the pandemic, when Cuomo’s daily briefings helped cement a national reputation for leadership. The briefings, in which he promised to deliver “just the facts,” won him an International Emmy and helped lead to his book, “American Crisis.”
“He stepped in it, more than a little bit. It would be bad enough if this had come out and he had not been publicly sort of celebrating, and been celebrated, for his handling of the pandemic,” said Jeanne Zaino, political science professor at Iona College. “But putting that aside, it doesn’t get more serious than this. You’re talking about the deaths of 15,000 people.”
The Cuomo administration for months dramatically underreported the statewide number of COVID-19 deaths among longterm care residents. It is now nearly 15,000, up from the 8,500 previously disclosed.
The new toll amounts to about one-seventh of the roughly 90,000 people living in nursing homes as of 2019 in New York, which has among the most care home residents in the nation.
Cuomo has pointed to a small but growing body of research suggesting unchecked community spread is the biggest factor in nursing home outbreaks, and he has said inadequate federal government help with travel restrictions, testing and protective gear left New York City and its suburbs particularly vulnerable.
He has dismissed criticism as political and noted the thousands of nursing home residents’ deaths in hospitals were always counted in the state’s overall tally.
“Died in a hospital, died in a nursing home — they died,” he said Jan. 29.
The uproar might not have the same impact on the third-term Democrat as it would if he were facing re-election for the first time this year, Zaino said. But it could make him less likely to be tapped for a post in the Biden administration. And Cuomo — who says he will run again in 2022 — is now facing criticism that is increasingly coming from members of his own party.
“The governor’s lack of transparency and stonewalling regarding his administration’s nursing home actions is unacceptable,” said state Sen. John Mannion, one of 14 Democratic state senators who said Friday that Cuomo’s expanded emergency powers should be repealed as soon as possible.
The higher death tolls were only divulged hours after a report last month from Democratic state Attorney General Letitia James examining the administration’s failure to include nursing home residents who died at hospitals. The updated numbers backed up findings of an Associated Press investigation last year that concluded the state could have been understating deaths by thousands.
Nursing home residents’ advocates and relatives have questioned whether the virus’s spread in nursing homes was fueled by a March 25 state directive that barred the facilities from refusing people just because they had COVID-19. The directive was intended to free up space in rapidly filling hospitals.
Debra Diehl, 62, who lost her 85-year-old father, Reeves Hupman, to presumptive COVID-19 in May at a nursing home outside Albany, wants to know why Cuomo and the state didn’t do more to separate residents who may have had the virus, perhaps by putting them in field hospitals.
“They had people coming up, sent from downstate hospitals up here,” Diehl said. “It just seemed like Typhoid Marys, just spreading it further. He did not know what he was doing, or he did not care.”
“It just seemed like Typhoid Marys, just spreading it further. [Cuomo] did not know what he was doing, or he did not care.” – DEBRA DIEHL, WHOSE FATHER DIED OF PRESUMPTIVE COVID-19 AT A NURSING HOME OUTSIDE ALBANY