TSA scrambling for vaccine access for front-line workers

The Transportation Security Administration’s chief medical officer instructed field managers this week to plead with local health departments and airport authorities to give the agency’s employees priority access to coronavirus vaccines since the Department of Homeland Security was not included in plans to give shots to federal employees under Operation Warp Speed.

Fabrice Czarnecki, the medical officer, said in a memo that the managers, called federal security directors, should underscore that the agency’s security officers process thousands of travelers each day and that officers needed vaccines “as soon as possible after front line health care workers.”

Czarnecki said the security directors should also encourage officers who are veterans, military reservists or members of the National Guard to try to get vaccinated by the Department of Veterans Affairs or the Defense Department.

“My goal is [to] leverage all options to get vaccine access to TSA’s front line employees as TSA continues to pursue other avenues for vaccine access,” he said in the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The virus has taken a heavy toll on the agency, with more than 4,000 employees testing positive and more than 800 of its staff currently sick. Eleven employees have died, including the Saturday death of a security officer in Honolulu who had worked at the agency since 2002.

Despite the number of cases and the urgency Czarnecki conveyed in the memo, agency officials say that in most cases the virus appears to be spreading to TSA employees outside of work.

Nonetheless, the memo shows how the agency is scrambling to get access to the vaccine for a group of employees who have continued to work at airports throughout the pandemic. Relying on local health agencies to prioritize TSA officers could lead to a patchy rollout of vaccinations.

Three TSA officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, said field leaders are effectively on their own to navigate a patchwork of health departments and airport authorities to get front-line workers vaccinated, rather than any centralized and coordinated federal effort.

In a letter Thursday to acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, questioned whether the department had done enough to make testing and vaccines available to front-line workers.

“I first wrote to you in July after DHS reached a record high number of employees that had tested positive or were in quarantine since the Department began regularly reporting such data to the Committee,” Thompson wrote. “Unfortunately, these numbers have continued to increase at an alarming rate.”

Thompson asked Wolf for an explanation of how the department and its agencies would secure vaccines “including an explanation for how vaccinations will be prioritized based on job description or location.”

Wolf’s office did not respond to a request for comment on its efforts to gain access to vaccines.