State official: Vaccine rollout blocked by federal government

Florida’s top emergency management official told state leaders Thursday he has hired workers, set up vaccination sites and activated the state plan to roll out the COVID-19 vaccines — but the federal government isn’t providing enough supplies or information on how many doses the state will receive.

“We have a plan. We are following the plan,” said Jared

Moskowitz, director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management. “What went wrong? Supply, allocations, lack of infor

mation. How do you do longrange planning with only six days of information? How do you build infrastructure when information changes week to week? When allocations drop? When you have to close sites in the beginning of an operation because you can’t feed them? That is what is happening.”

Moskowitz said the federal government tells him on Tuesdays what he will receive the following week. Instead of Florida getting more each week, the state has been receiving fewer doses. Miami-Dade County, the state’s largest county by senior population, received only 20,000 doses this week.

“At that pace, based on supply by the federal government, it will take 100 weeks to vaccinate the county,” Moskowitz told the Florida House Pandemic and Public Emergencies Committee on Thursday. “This is why it’s a supply issue.”

Florida will continue to rely on local health offices and partnerships with hospitals and pharmacies. It has 70 vaccination sites and has hired 1,200 medical workers to help inoculate the state’s seniors, considered a priority in the rollout. Moskowitz said he would like to have all 700 Publix pharmacies in the state become vaccination sites eventually and have a statewide vaccine registration system operating soon.

“It’s not that we can’t open more locations. It’s that we can’t feed those locations,” he explained. “Just like we couldn’t feed testing centers in the beginning because there weren’t enough swabs, weren’t enough tests, it’s the almost identical issue.”

On Thursday, the state’s website said 707,478 people in Florida have been vaccinated with the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine — about 60% older than 65. But Moskowitz said providers are not entering information in the 24-hour timeframe required, skewing the true picture of the effort in Florida.

“This week we did 390,000 shots according to our information. That’s a good number,” he said. “I believe that’s a combination of shots we did this week and older information.” The data entry lag is a problem most states are dealing with, he said.

What is working, however, is the state’s strategy to get minorities vaccinated. Moskowitz said by turning local places of worship into vaccination centers in minority communities, each of the nine sites have been able to vaccinate 500 seniors. “I would do 50 a weekend if I could,” he said.

“I want to get to the end of a nightmare as fast as possible,” Moskowitz said. “Dr. [Anthony] Fauci [the top infectious disease expert in the U.S.] said it could take a year to vaccinate all of this country. I pray it doesn’t take that long.”

As Moskowitz concluded his testimony, Surgeon General Scott Rivkees spoke about the vaccine rollout to the Senate Select Committee on Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

Rivkees said Florida has been successful at ramping up testing. The state has reported 23.4 million test results, and he said drugs and therapeutics that target the coronavirus are helping people recover. But, he said, “the vaccine is going to be our path forward out of this.”

Rivkees outlined the inconsistency of the allotment of vaccine Florida has received 179,400 in week one; 495,625 in week two; 289,925 in week three; 253,350 in week four and 254,825 in week five.

“At the present time, the allotment is based on the pro-rated population of individuals 18 and older,” he said. That could change if the federal government bases the allotment on the number of seniors per capita. Florida is second in the nation (to Maine) for its senior population.

With 1.5 million vaccine doses in the state, but only half in arms, Senator Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart, asked Rivkees, “What’s the hold up?”

“Just because a vaccine may be stored in a refrigerator today doesn’t mean it’s not going to be used tomorrow,” Rivkees said. “Rest assured the vaccines we have on hand will be going in people’s arms as quickly and safely as possible.” He, too, said there’s a delay in the reporting.

Both Moskowitz and Rivkees said mask-wearing and social distancing will need to continue even as the vaccine distribution ramps up in the state.