Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Ignored warnings take covid-19 toll
After riot, legislators’ exposure feared
PROVIDENCE, R. I. — Public health officials sounded the alarm for months, complaining that they did not have enough support or money to get covid-19 vaccines quickly into arms. Now the slower- than- expected start to the largest vaccination effort in U.S. history is proving them right.
Meanwhile, lawmakers who hunkered down together for safety while a mob supporting President Donald Trump’s bid to reject the November election attacked the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday may have been exposed to someone in the same room who was infected with the
coronavirus, according to the office of the attending physician.
State and local public health departments across the U.S. have reported a variety of obstacles as they work to ramp up the shots, most notably a lack of leadership from the federal government. Many officials worry that they are losing precious time at the height of the pandemic, and the delays could cost lives.
States lament a lack of clarity on how many doses they will receive and when. They say more resources should have been devoted to education campaigns to ease concerns among people leery of getting the shots. And although the federal government recently approved $8.7 billion for the vaccine effort, it will take time to reach places that could have used the money months ago to prepare to deliver shots more efficiently.
Such complaints have become a common refrain in a nation where public health officials have been left largely on their own to solve complex problems.
“The recurring theme is the lack of a national strategy and the attempt to pass the buck down the line, lower and lower, until the poor people at the receiving end have nobody else that they can send the buck to,” said Gianfranco Pezzino, who was the public health officer in Shawnee County, Kan., until retiring last month.
Operation Warp Speed, the federal vaccine program, had promised to distribute enough doses to immunize 20 million people in the U.S. in December. It missed that target, and as of Friday, about 6.6 million people had received their first shot, according to a tracker from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 22 million doses have been delivered to states.
The American Hospital Association has estimated that 1.8 million people need to be vaccinated daily from Jan. 1 to May 31 to reach widespread immunity by the summer. The current pace is more than 1 million people per day below that.
President-elect Joe Biden on Friday called the rollout a “travesty,” noting the lack of a national plan to get doses into arms and reiterating his commitment to administer 100 million shots in his first 100 days. He has not shared details and was expected to discuss the effort this week. His office announced a plan to release most doses right away, rather than holding second doses in reserve, the more conservative approach taken by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration defined its primary role as developing coronavirus vaccines and delivering them to states, which would then take over and ensure that vaccine doses traveled “the last mile” into arms. Each state had to develop its own plan, including issuing guidelines for who gets vaccinated first. Several health experts complained about that approach, saying it led to confusion and a patchwork response.
Several public health officials and experts say they believe some of the early glitches are smoothing out. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said the slow start should not be surprising given the immense scale of the task.
“It was not going to be seamless,” he said.
Still, Plescia said the federal government could have done more ahead of the rollout — such as releasing billions of dollars earlier to help with staffing, technology and other operational needs.
WARNING UNHEEDED
An ongoing investigation by The Associated Press and Kaiser Health News detailed how state and local health departments have been underfunded for decades. Public health officials have warned since the spring that they lacked the staff, money and tools they needed to deploy a vaccine. The money was not approved until the end of December.
Vaccine distribution involves a long, complex chain of events. Every dose must be tracked. Providers need to know how much staffing they will need. Eligible people must be notified to schedule their shots, given the vaccine’s handling requirements and the need to observe people for 15 minutes after the shot — all while social distancing is observed.
It’s difficult to plan too far ahead because the number of doses the state receives can fluctuate. Hospitals cannot give all their workers shots on the same day because of possible side effects and staffing issues, so they must be spaced out.
Officials in several states, including Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New Jersey, said the lack of supply is one of the biggest obstacles to getting more people vaccinated.
Some communities have seen large numbers of medical workers put off getting the shot, even though they are first in line. Columbus, Ohio, has had lower-than-expected demand among top priority groups, including emergency medical workers.
A public education campaign could have helped address the hesitancy among health care workers that has slowed the rollout of the first shots, said James Garrow, a spokesman for the Philadelphia health department. Instead, officials for months talked about the speed at which they were developing the vaccines — which did not help alleviate concerns that it might not be safe.
“There just hasn’t been good messaging about the safety and the purposefulness of the safety protocols,” Garrow said.
The federal government has done little to provide information resources that local officials can tailor to their own communities to address concerns of people such as pregnant women or Black men living in rural areas, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, who is a member of Biden’s covid-19 advisory board.
“You don’t need 50 different states trying to do this kind of work. What you want to have is a smorgasbord of information sources that address different populations that any one state can use,” Osterholm said. “That’s what we don’t have right now.”
CAPITOL EXPOSURE?
Separately, the Capitol’s attending physician notified all lawmakers Sunday may have been exposed to someone testing positive for covid-19 while they sheltered at an undisclosed location during the Capitol siege, and urged them to be tested. The infected individual was not named.
Dr. Brian Monahan, wrote that “many members of the House community were in protective isolation in the large room — some for several hours” on Wednesday. He said “individuals may have been exposed to another occupant with coronavirus infection.”
Dozens of lawmakers were whisked to the secure location after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol that day, breaking through barricades to roam the halls and offices and ransacking the building.
Some members of Congress huddled for hours in the large room, while others were there for a shorter period.
Two House aides confirmed to The Washington Post that Monahan was referring to a room where scores of House members were taken amid the riot. Video first published by Punchbowl News on Friday showed maskless Republicans — including Reps. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.; Michael Cloud, R-Texas; Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla.; and Scott Perry, R-Pa. — refusing masks offered by Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., while in the room.
No further details were provided on which person has tested positive for the virus.
Blunt Rochester tweeted Friday that while she was “disappointed in my colleagues who refused to wear a mask, I was encouraged by those who did. My goal, in the midst of what I feared was a super spreader event, was to make the room at least a little safer.”
Members of Congress qualified for priority access to the coronavirus vaccine, and many — but not all — have received at least the first shot of a two-dose regimen. Some congressional staffers have received the coronavirus vaccine as well.
More than 2 million coronavirus cases have been reported in the United States so far this year. The daily death toll for the first time surpassed 4,000 just one day after Wednesday’s insurrection. Experts have warned the storming of the Capitol building could have contributed to the public health crisis as a potential superspreader event.
“There’s going to be chains of transmission that come out of that kind of mass gathering,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said during an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “The crowd wasn’t adhering to what we know are good practices in terms of mask-wearing and other things. I think they deliberately eschewed those things. So, yeah, we’re going to see chains of transmission come out of that kind of a gathering, for sure.”
Information for this article was contributed by Michelle R. Smith, Candice Choi, Lisa Mascaro, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Colleen Long and Michael Balsamo of The Associated Press; and by Amy B. Wang, Paulina Firozi and Mike DeBonis of The Washington Post.