My 94-year-old father needs the COVID-19 shot — where is the vaccination plan?
My dad calls me every day at 8 p.m. It is both the highlight of my evening — and a soul-crushing window into the worst of the vaccine rollout. At 94, my dad is a virtual shut-in in his one-bedroom apartment in an independent living facility just a few miles from my house. He is a prisoner in his apartment not because he is too old or frail to go outside — he is in remarkable shape for his age — but because he has not yet been vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19.
As we approach mid-January amid the worst pandemic in his very long lifetime, my dad still has no idea when he will receive his vaccine, a month after the first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech inoculation began being distributed. This incredible failure of our federal government has left millions of elderly Americans like him needlessly vulnerable, isolated, uncertain and depressed.
My dad is a survivor. As a child, he lived through the Great Depression, sometimes eating ketchup soup or cooked cabbage for dinner. He served in the Navy during World War II, but thankfully saw no combat. He lost an eye to cancer almost 30 years ago, and then watched as my mom succumbed to melanoma almost two decades later. For as long as I can remember, he has maintained a sunny disposition, shrugging off life’s many challenges. But increasingly, on our nightly calls, my dad sounds utterly defeated.
He reports that many of his friends and neighbors in the independent living facility are despondent and confused about what lies ahead. They are unsure when they will get their vaccines and whether they will ever be able to return to a “normal” life. The Oak Park facility is extremely well run and has navigated the pandemic with very few cases. It has been vigilant in protecting its residents and has done everything it can to keep them happy and engaged despite many pandemic-related restrictions. But the facility’s managers are at the mercy of a federal and state rollout that has been painfully slow, has lacked transparency and has left many, like my dad, frustrated and confused.
How did we get here? To be fair, the federal government did marshal resources to help vaccine candidates be developed, reviewed by regulators and manufactured at scale in record time. But in focusing its energies and money on helping companies develop vaccine candidates and to manufacture them, the federal government has largely ignored the process of getting those shots into arms. So now states such as Illinois, underfunded and already stressed by the ongoing pandemic, must cobble together their own processes — assuming they can get enough doses from the federal government. Similarly stressed public health departments, local governments and health care providers are forced to create and execute their own programs. The result is a patchwork, as so much of the pandemic response has been. It is chaotic, slow, uneven and opaque.
Now the federal government is urging states to re-prioritize their distribution plans and open up the vaccinations to millions more people than the U.S. has doses for, creating yet another messy scramble and more confusion. While I know of many friends in health care who have received their first and second doses — and some older people in other cities and states who have gotten at least one shot — there seems to be little rhyme or reason for which elderly residents receive the vaccine and when. It seems just as likely I will win Powerball as I will succeed in getting my dad a vaccine.
It did not have to be this way. It is not this way in other countries.
On our most recent nightly call, my dad again enumerated the myriad ways his life has shrunk. A foodie, he no longer dreams of exploring new restaurants and cuisines. He simply wants to eat with friends in his building’s pandemic-closed dining room instead of alone in his apartment. He dreams of the day when he can safely go to the local Jewel with me, a seemingly mundane trip that we used to make weekly but haven’t done since March. When I visit, I would give anything to give him a hug, but physical contact is prohibited.
On our call, my dad, wise even beyond his years, said “they should have been developing a plan for distribution while they were developing the vaccine. It’s a disgrace.” Hard to argue.