White House on Connecticut plan: Guidance issued ‘for a reason’
WASHINGTON — When asked about Gov. Ned Lamont’s decision to go with age groups for vaccination order instead of front-line workers and people with medical conditions, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday the federal guidance Lamont bucked was issued “for a reason.”
“Obviously governors make different choices about the prioritization and the prioritization order,” Psaki said. “But we stand by the guidelines we’ve recommended at a national level.”
Psaki did not call for Connecticut to reverse the decision Lamont announced on Monday, when he recast the state’s COVID-19 vaccination plan. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises putting essential workers and people with medical conditions ahead of middle-age people.
Dr. Helen Talbot, an infectious disease specialist who serves on a national panel that advises the CDC on vaccine prioritization, said Wednesday she worried Connecti
cut’s plan will result in more deaths among people with chronic health conditions.
“It’s definitely easier to do it by age,” said Talbot, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who helped write the recommendations. “I just worry that there are people with lots of chronic co-morbid conditions who are incredibly high risk, even more so than some of their older neighbors, and they will have to wait longer and we may see more of them die.”
Connecticut’s new plan will vaccinate teachers in separate clinics, as other populations will be immunized by age group. In contrast, the CDC guidance — which states are not bound to follow — pushes other kinds of essential workers such as grocery and transit workers to the front of the line, along with people who have underlying health conditions — a group that states are left to define.
The CDC itself has modified its recommendations previously, for example, adding people age 65 to 74 as a priority a few weeks ago.
“We make recommendations at the federal level for a reason because there are groups that we feel should be prioritized whether they are frontline workers, health care workers, individuals
over a certain age as you noted and our objective of course is to get to the stage where there are recommendations for people who are much younger, who don’t have pre-existing health conditions that would mean they would qualify,” Psaki said. “That’s the reason we lay them out as we do.”
Lamont spokesman Max Reiss said in response to Psaki’s comments that the Trump and Biden administrations have both held the position that the federal government does not dictate how states will respond to the coronavirus crisis.
“It’s up to the states through their governors to make their vaccine distribution decisions, and that’s what she reiterated today,” Reiss said, noting that Psaki did not call for Lamont to reverse his decision.
The CDC and White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday. It’s unclear whether Lamont and Zients discussed the change on a group call about vaccinations for governors Tuesday.
Starting Monday, Connecticut residents age 55 to 64 become eligible under Lamont’s plan. The eligibility expands every few weeks until everyone age 16 and above can get vaccinated, with a target date of May 3.
The state plans to make an exception for teachers, school workers and child care professionals, who will also be eligible to receive the vaccine next month at separate clinics, in schools wherever possible.
Connecticut has already vaccinated more than 20 percent of people age 16 and older, including health care workers, nursing home residents and people 65 years and older — with a speed and organization that has won praise compared with the bumpy roll-outs in some other states.
Lamont said the change was motivated by a desire for more efficiency and his team determined age-status would be the quickest, simplest way to vaccinate the population, instead of wrestling with the hurdles of proving people’s employer status or verifying health conditions. Citing medical experts and coronavirus data, he also said age is the primary factor determining illness and death in COVID-19.
After health care workers, nursing home residents and people age 75 and older, the CDC recommends vaccinating grocery store workers, postal workers, public transit employees, teachers, child care providers, police and corrections officers and food and agriculture workers.
The CDC also suggests giving priority to people that
have health conditions that put them at higher risk for serious illness or death from COVID-19, regardless of their age.
“We really tried to balance maintenance of society and those who put their lives at risk to put food on the shelves and food delivered to the grocery stores and the police and firemen and health care workers in balance with the age and comorbid conditions,” Talbot said. “I like to think of it as a seesaw to maintain societal function because if you don’t have that, everyone is at risk of starvation... how do you maintain so people can survive and also lower the mortality and morbidity due to covid and reduce the stress on the hospitals?”
Talbot also criticized the federal government for not providing funding earlier to state and local health departments to pay for the logistical challenges associated with implementing the CDC vaccine guidance.
The Lamont administration has highlighted the difficulties of verifying the employment and health conditions of people looking to get immunized and in other states, online and phone vaccine appointment systems have crashed when overloaded with too many people trying to sign up for appointments at once.