Who gets the COVID vaccine next in Conn.?
State adjusts system for scheduling inoculations
Gov. Ned Lamont, at age 66, is no longer among the group of people eligible to receive the
COVID-19 vaccine after front-line health care workers and nursing homes patients.
Lamont, like many older or more medically vulnerable people, now finds himself in Phase
1C, a third tier of Connecticut residents expected to receive the vaccine after essential workers like police, firefighters and grocery store workers, but before everyone else.
The governor said this week the new tier was created based on the recommendation of an advisory board at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that stated people over the age of
75 and essential workers should be next in line for the vaccine, the Associated Press reported.
Connecticut health care workers and staff and residents of nursing homes have already begun receiving doses of the vaccine. That plan hasn’t changed.
Originally, those over the age of 65 would be in Phase 1B, the second tier of people to get vaccinated.
The tier included a broad swath of people, including first responders and essential workers.
The new CDC recommendations move people between the ages of 65 and 74 to the new third tier.
“I think CDC has narrowed that cohort a little bit, just to those who are the most vulnerable,” Lamont said this week.
Those with high-risk medical conditions and “other essential workers” are also included in the third round.
While Lamont said Monday he will ultimately sign off on a dis
tribution plan, he said he would not contradict the leaders of his vaccine advisory group.
The second wave of vaccinations for those in Phase 1B are expected to begin at the end of January, according to Lamont.
Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer, said employers of people in the second wave will upload a roster of their employees to a system that will allow residents to schedule a time to get vaccinated.
He noted part of the vaccine advisory group met Monday to discuss the CDC’s recommendations, and plans to meet again next week.
Some members of the advisory group questioned parts of the vaccine distribution plan.
Takeisha Dwan Everette, executive director of Health Equity Solutions, raised concerns that the recommendations were based mostly on age without considering race or the rate of infection in the community where the person lives.
“I fundamentally disagree with how from the beginning of this process we have excluded the lens of equity, yet talked about it — and by we, I mean the nation, not this group,” said Everette, whose organization advocates for equal health care access.
She said she disagreed with focusing on those over the age of 75 “because it ignores a huge group of people who will otherwise die if they don’t get this, at worst ... and at best, spread to a whole bunch of other people who will have poor outcomes.”
Properly preparing local health departments could also prove challenging.
“It’s been extremely difficult to ramp up the health departments to be ready to vaccinate because of the fact that there are extremely stringent storage requirements,” said Raymond Sullivan, health director for the town of Brookfield.
He described difficulties registering with the vaccine administration management system, a web portal people will use to schedule an appointment and health departments use to manage vaccine clinics.
Unlike his experience during the H1N1 outbreak, “this is very, very complicated,” Sullivan said.
“I just don’t think that a lot of health departments are going to be ready to vaccinate when we open up 1B, and we’re supposed to be the front-line vaccinators,” he said.