N.J. Gov. Murphy is still slow-rolling the coronavirus vaccine rollout
The state of New Jersey - specifically Gov. Phil Murphy and Department of Health Head Honcho Judith Persichilli - are continuing to slow roll the state’s coronavirus vaccine rollout, at this point completely ignoring the advice of the U.S. Surgeon General and top medical experts.
“We want to reiterate that ACIP guidance are recommendations, not mandates,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted the other day. “States not only can, but SHOULD aggressively expand vaccinations to other phases if current supply exceeds demand in phase 1a!”
Then there was Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the FDA commissioner, who said Friday that states need to start vaccinating lower-priority groups and that it “will go a long way toward using these vaccines appropriately and getting them into the arms of individuals.”
So what has Murphy and Co. done? Expanded the vaccine to police and fire personnel, the first members of the “1B” cohort to take it. But that’s it.
And according to the CDC, as of Friday, the state has administered only 155,458 of the 572,250 doses it has received.
This is unacceptable, and so I asked why this is. I was directed to Murphy’s Jan. 6 press conference by
Janelle Fleming, the spokesperson for the Department of Health, in which he attributed the delay to 1) undercounting by the CDC; 2) vaccine hesitancy; 3) the holidays delayed it; 4) blaming the feds; 5) blaming the complexity of distributing the vaccine.
Meanwhile, the state is still sitting - by their numbers - on 60% of the shots. I asked why not open it up to more people so as to, you know, vaccinate more people.
“New Jersey is using a phased approach to COVID-19 vaccination to ensure that limited vaccines are distributed in a fair and equitable manner. Phase 1A began Dec.
15, 2020. Phase 1B frontline first responders began Jan.
7, 2021,” was the answer I got from Fleming. It went on from there, but it was equally unenlightening.
So I kept asking questions, such as why isn’t the state investigating the oneshot method, where you inoculate as many people as you can with one shot, and worry about the second shot later.
The original plan twoshot plan? Great concept, but it’s simply no longer feasible with the muchmore contagious variant knocking on our door. At this point, we need to follow the lead of Britain, and what will end up being most of Europe: Get that first shot into as many people, as quickly as possible, and worry about the second shot later.
Why? Well, two reasons.
One, because Presidentelect Joe Biden announced Friday that’s exactly what he plans to do once he is sworn in. And two? Because math. I’ll let someone just a teense smarter than me explain.
“Giving 100 million people - particularly those at high risk - a single shot that is 80 to 90 percent effective will save far more lives than giving 50 million people two shots that are 95 percent effective, wrote Brown University School of Public Health dead Ashish Jha and University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine Chair Robert Wachter in a Washington Post editorial.
The response from Flem
ing?
“At this time, New Jersey is following the FDA’s guidance to complete all vaccine courses at the appropriate intervals under the emergency use authorization (EUAs).”
Also, note the “high risk” portion of the quote from the docs above. While it’s wonderful our New Jersey police and fire - including part-time fire - personnel are now being vaccinated, the fact is it’s the senior citizens among us need the vaccine more.
So to be clear: We need to ditch the two-shot plan in the short term, and we need to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible.
Instead, we have healthy
20-year-old part-time firemen getting vaccinated and between 60% and 70% of our already-shipped vaccine sitting in freezers, earmarked for 1A, and clearly there not being enough people or places to administer the vaccine. All the while, the variant is going to knock us on our ass once it explodes.
So what is Gov. Murphy and Co. doing about this?
Giving pat answers to my questions, mostly.
Meanwhile, other governors are stepping up their game.
In fact, on Friday eight Democratic governors, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, sent a letter, obtained by The New York Times, to Alex Azar, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, asking him to release the nation’s stockpile of vaccines now to the states.
Gov. Murphy’s signature was not on the letter.
At this point, I have no idea what Gov. Murphy is thinking. The vaccine program in New Jersey needs to expand immediately, the 400,000-odd shots that are literally sitting in {expletive}ing storage need to be put into the arms of New Jersey residents immediately, the two-shot plan has to be scrapped immediately, senior citizens need to get the shot before healthy part-time firemen and trustees of hospitals (which was happening, for the record, as I was told this by a trustee of a hospital, but all of a sudden stopped after I inquired about it to Fleming). This is not brain surgery; it is, however, lifesaving measures.
The fact Murphy has not budged one bit off his master vaccination plan, the fact he has not pivoted one inch, is bad policy at best, deadly at worst.
I don’t care whether you think the coronavirus is a hoax or if you think it’s a world-ender, you should be disgusted by the hubris of the Murphy administration right now. I know I am.