City officials target vaccine date for 65 and up
City officials are asking Milwaukee residents ages 65 and older, and on deck to get the coronavirus vaccine, to “hold tight” as the city is aiming to vaccinate those residents starting Feb. 1 at the Wisconsin Center.
On Saturday, Milwaukee Health Commissioner Marlaina Jackson said officials are not expecting to be able to vaccinate older residents in the coming week. City officials are asking residents 65 and older to go to healthymke.com for information.
“In the next week the City of Milwaukee Health Department is creating a link, as well as providing a phone number, for individuals in that age range to sign up for actual vaccinations,” Jackson said.
Mayor Tom Barrett said the city is still vaccinating health care and longterm facility workers, along with police, fire-fighters and EMS employees, all people in the Phase 1A category for vaccine distribution.
“Obviously this is all very fluid and if we get a surprisingly high number of supply or if we have extra, we can change it,” Barrett said. “We don’t want to create false expectations, that’s what we’re anticipating right now.”
The state announced Tuesday individuals 65 and older are eligible for the vaccine, but Barrett said that doesn’t mean those people can start receiving the vaccine this coming week.
“There’s a difference between being ‘eligible’ and having the supply available, and that’s one of the challenges that we face right now is having the available supply,” Barrett said. “Even though individuals 65 and older are eligible, we may not have sufficient supply of vaccines for everyone who wants to get their vaccination this week.”
Barrett said he encourages people to get the vaccination but does not want to cause any frustration or disappointment with those trying to get the vaccine, and does not want to overwhelm the system.
“The best way for people to operate is people who are 65 and older, if they have an established health care provider to be in contact with them (about the vaccine),” Barrett said. “People 65 and older without an established health care provider can visit healthymke.com to sign up for alerts when vaccine sites are available.”
Barrett said the Wisconsin Center has not been opened for residents 65 and older to receive the vaccine. He said there are roughly 700,000 people in the state who are 65 and older, and the state, at the moment, is only getting 70,000 vaccines per week.
Last week, Milwaukee got about 3,000 vaccines but was able to stretch it to about 3,400 vaccinations.
“We were able to stretch it because Pfizer, we found, when we got the vaccinations, each dosage was labeled for five (people) but we could actually get six,” Barrett said, adding in the future dosages will be appropriately labeled for the number of dosages each vial contains. “Which will actually reduce the number of vials that we receive.”
Jackson said the city requested 5,000 vaccines for the coming week but has not received confirmation of how many vaccines it will receive.
How many vaccines Milwaukee will get, Barrett said, is dependent on what the state does with its 70,000 vaccines.