Medically vulnerable in US put near end of vaccine line
RALEIGH, N.C. >> When Ann Camden learned last month that her 17-year-old daughter got exposed to the coronavirus at school and was being sent home, she packed her belongings, jumped in the car and made the twohour drive to the coast to stay with her recently vaccinated parents.
The 50-year-old mother had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer and could not afford to become infected. She also was not yet eligible under North Carolina’s rules to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. So she left her twin daughters with her husband and fled for safety.
Across the United States, millions of medically vulnerable people who initially were cited as a top vaccination priority group got slowly bumped down the list as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention modified its guidelines to favor the elderly, regardless of their physical condition, and workers in a wide range of job sectors.
North Carolina is one of 24 states that currently places people under 65 with “underlying medical conditions” near the bottom of the pack to receive the vaccine, according to Jen Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. A report she wrote for the foundation last month listed Pennsylvania as the lone state making vaccines available to the medically vulnerable during its first phase of distribution.
When North Carolina unveiled its initial guidance in October, it placed people with multiple chronic conditions near the top of the list. In response to December recommendations from the CDC to prioritize people 75 and older, however, it dropped those with chronic conditions to Phase 2. When the guidance changed again to expand eligibility to those 65 and up, medically vulnerable residents learned in January they would be dropped to Phase 4 — to be vaccinated after “frontline essential workers” but before “everyone.”
“When they slid us to group 4, it was very quiet,” Camden said. “It was like, ‘We don’t want to talk about it. We’re just gonna kind of tuck you over there.’ That in itself was kind of insulting.”
The state’s top public health official, Dr. Mandy Cohen, said residents under 65 with chronic conditions were moved down the list after health officials received data showing elderly residents are far more likely to die of COVID-19, though she acknowledged “age is not a perfect proxy for risk.”
Camden decided not to wait for the state to qualify her. Just two days after she arrived at her parents’ house, a friend connected her with a CVS pharmacist in Wilmington who had spare doses of the vaccine about to go to waste. Camden received a Moderna shot in the pharmacist’s dining room on Feb. 21.
“It’s incumbent on all of us to take it when we can get it,” Camden said. “I don’t want to feel guilty or embarrassed because I was gonna get it whenever I could.”
Jon D’Angelo, a 32-yearold Carteret County resident who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, didn’t qualify for a vaccine since he doesn’t live in a long-term care facility. He said he jumped the line, but declined to describe where and how he got the vaccine. After a minute-long pause when asked how he justified his actions, he replied, “Justice is more important.”
Responding to the frustrations of people like Camden and D’Angelo, states are now revising their guidelines again. As of Monday, 28 states had at least partially opened up vaccine eligibility statewide to those with high-risk medical conditions, Kates said. Four additional states are making the vaccine available to medically vulnerable residents living in certain counties.
North Carolina announced this week that it would start vaccinating people 16 years or older with at least one of 18 atrisk conditions on March 17. And last week, the state expanded its eligibility guidelines to include people like D’Angelo who receive athome care. D’Angelo is now retroactively eligible under
Phase 1, which launched in December.
“I’m glad they did it, but the fact that it took three months to correct is outrageous,” D’Angelo said.
On Monday, South Carolina expanded eligibility to disabled and at-risk people, and Michigan did so for medically vulnerable residents 50 and older. California is opening up vaccinations to the disabled and atrisk on March 15.
In Georgia, the governor announced this week that those 16 or older with serious health conditions will be eligible starting March 15. Shana Frentz, a 36-yearold with two autoimmune conditions, said she secured an appointment at a Georgia pharmacy that began signing up people a day before the announcement. Before
that, she had explored the possibility of going to a neighboring state. During the months it took before she became eligible in Georgia, she said she and others like her felt “kind of tossed aside.”
Maura Wozniak, a 42-year-old Charlotte-area resident, has cystic fibrosis and will wait until it’s her turn to get vaccinated. Wozniak was furious with North Carolina’s decision to push her back in line, as it meant a lengthier delay for her kids to get back to the classroom. But after learning on social media that she’d soon become eligible, she cried in relief.
“They were able to hear the pleas from high-risk individuals in the state,” Wozniak said. “The fact that they gave us a date was
promising. Is everything gonna be perfect? No. But at least there’s a certain window now.”
Associated Press writer Anila Yoganathan in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Follow AP’s coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https:// apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.
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Anderson is a corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
WILMINGTON, DEL. >> As he stood in the Rose Garden celebrating his first big legislative win, President Joe Biden gestured to the White House and said it’s a “magnificent building” to live in. Except on weekends. Of the eight weekends since Biden took office, he has spent three at his longtime home outside Wilmington, Delaware, including this weekend. Tentative plans for another weekend visit were scrubbed due to Senate action on Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.
Biden also spent a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.
Many presidents have complained at one point or another about feeling confined in the White House. Biden already has echoed earlier presidents in comparing the experience to living in a “gilded cage.”
So trading the 132-room executive mansion for a less confining, more relaxing weekend hangout can help presidents unwind, said University of Chicago political scientist William Howell.
“What he wanted to be was president,” Howell said. “It is not the White House per se that is the draw.”
The White House defends Biden’s leisure travel at a time when both he and federal health officials have been pleading with the public to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, including by avoiding unnecessary travel.
“The president lives in Wilmington. It’s his home. That’s where he’s lived for many, many years,” press secretary Jen Psaki said recently. “And as you know, as any president of the United States does, he takes a private
airplane called Air Force One to travel there.”
“I think most Americans would also see that as a unique circumstance,” she said of the government aircraft available to Biden.
No president travels alone, though, no matter how private the plane. It requires that lots of other people travel as well. And the costs mount quickly.
Besides the Air Force flight crew, a president’s travel party includes Secret Service agents, White House staff, journalists and family. Depending on the destination and purpose of the trip, lawmakers, Cabinet secretaries or other guests may fly with the president.
Biden occasionally brought some of his six grandchildren on trips when he was vice president, as well as during last year’s presidential campaign.
Presidential travel doesn’t come cheap.
Federal agencies spent an estimated $13.6 million on four trips that then-President Donald Trump took to his waterfront Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in February and March
of 2017, the Government Accountability Office reported in 2019.
The figure includes $10.6 million to operate government aircraft and boats, and $3 million for transportation, lodging, meals and other expenses for government personnel supporting the president on the road, the report said.
But not all presidential travel is the same.
Trump took the more familiar version of Air Force One, a modified 747, on the two-hour-plus flight to the commercial airport in West Palm Beach, Florida. Biden has flown a smaller version of the aircraft for the roughly half-hour flight to the Delaware Air National Guard Base. He made this weekend’s trip on the Marine One presidential helicopter.
Trump’s Florida home is on the water, which required the addition of Coast Guard security patrols.
Biden goes back to his longtime home near Wilmington, where he lived as a senator before being elected vice president in 2008 and where he returned after his time in that office was up.
Now serving as Biden’s weekend refuge, the home is where he watched Tom Brady, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ new quarterback, win a record seventh Super Bowl ring in February. While there, Biden often meets with advisers, attends church and enjoys Sunday dinner with the family.
“We try to keep the Sunday night dinners,” Jill Biden told TV talk-show host Kelly Clarkson. “I mean, it’s been a little busy lately. We still do it, and the kids look forward to it.”
Biden owns a second home in the seaside community of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He has yet to visit it since becoming president but it could see more action as the weather warms up.
During a tearful farewell in January as he left
Wilmington for Washington, Biden credited the state with helping shape his values, character and world view. “It all comes from Delaware,” he said.
Biden lived the majority of his 78 years in Wilmington after his parents relocated from Scranton, Pennsylvania, when he was a boy. He represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate for 36 years, and was a regular passenger on the Amtrak train to and from Washington.
“Getting out of the White House was more cumbersome than it is now,” said Doug Wead, a former White House aide and author of books about presidents and their families.
Early presidents were consigned to bumpy trains, he said. But motorcades, Air Force One and Marine One all help to ease a modern president’s path out of the nation’s capital.
But there is no presidential playbook for how and where to spend the weekend.
Trump spent many weekends at Mar-a-Lago or his Trump golf club in central New Jersey, leading critics to accuse him of trying to profit off the presidency.
Barack Obama spent most Saturdays and Sundays in Washington because his young daughters belonged to weekend soccer and basketball leagues.
George W. Bush had his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Howell said Biden — who has cultivated his image as a “regular Joe” — has strong connections to his family, many of whom are in Delaware, that he wants to maintain.