HELP IS ON THE WAY
After panel’s approval, FDA is expected to approve Pfizer vaccine this weekend Florida to send ‘strike teams’ to vaccinate care-facility residents
People in long-term-care facilities will be among the first to get the shots because they are at greatest risk of contracting COVID-19. In South Florida, Jackson Health System and Memorial Healthcare System will each receive about 20,000 doses in the first round.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday offered new details on the state’s plan to allocate an initial 179,400 doses of likely-tobe-approved Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, saying the health department will send strike teams into long-term-care facilities to vaccinate those at greatest risk of contracting the disease.
The Florida Department of Health will send 21,450 doses of vaccine, using teams from the department as well as the Division of Emergency Management and National Guard, to areas with a “high concentration of [long-term-care] facilities,” DeSantis said. He added that those vaccination efforts will “supplement” those of CVS and Walgreens, which are partners in the federal government’s Operation
Warp Speed and are set to receive 60,450 of Florida’s Pfizer vaccine doses in the first round and will also be used for longterm-care facilities.
“Our top priority is residents of long-term-care facilities,” DeSantis said in the video message. “They are at the greatest risk and this vaccine could have a positive impact on them, not just protecting them from COVID, but allowing them to return to a more normal life.”
It remained unclear Thursday which long-term-care facilities would get the vaccine next week.
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine passed a critical milestone on Thursday when a panel of experts formally recommended that the Food and Drug Administration authorize the vaccine.
The agency is likely to do so within days, giving healthcare workers and nursing-home residents first priority to begin receiving the first shots early next week.
The FDA’s vaccine advisory panel, composed of independent scientific experts, infectiousdisease doctors and statisticians, voted in favor of emergency authorization for people 16 and older. Although the FDA does not have to follow the advice of its advisory panel, it usually does.
With this formal blessing, the nation might finally begin to slow the spread of the virus just as infections and deaths surge, reaching a record of more than 3,000 daily deaths on Wednesday. The FDA is expected to grant an emergency-use authorization on Saturday, according to people familiar with the agency’s planning, though they cautioned that last-minute legal or bureaucratic requirements could push the announcement to Sunday or later.
The initial shipment of 6.4 million doses will leave warehouses within 24 hours of being cleared by the FDA, according to federal officials. About half of those doses will be sent across the country, and the other half will be reserved for the initial recipients to receive their second dose about three weeks later.
The arrival of the first doses is the beginning of a complex, months-long distribution plan coordinated by federal and local health authorities, as well as large hospitals and pharmacy
The remaining 97,500 doses will go to five hospitals — two of them in South Florida — and they will receive about 20,000 doses each to vaccinate healthcare workers after the vaccine receives the expected full emergency approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to Jared Moskowitz, Florida’s director of Division of Emergency Management.
The five hospitals, which include Jackson Health System in Miami-Dade County and Memorial Healthcare System in Broward County, have already identified their employees who are eligible and willing to receive a vaccine, Moskowitz said.
Commenting on both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines at the end of November, DeSantis had said “Florida’s share would be at least a million, maybe as much as 2 million” doses of vaccine.
HOSPITALS PREPARE TO VACCINATE
The five Florida hospitals in the Pfizer rollout have also each identified about 25 other hospitals that would receive the doses after their own employees have been vaccinated, according to Moskowitz. Jackson Health System, Miami’s public-hospital network, has already identified nearly 3,000 employees who want the vaccine in the first phase. An official at Jackson said the hospital system expects to share its doses with other area hospitals in the following week to 10 days after it receives them.
Moskowitz said many of the logistical details will be kept secret due to security concerns about the precious cargo — deep-frozen vials of a potentially pandemic-ending technology.
“I can’t tell you where it’s landing, where it’s going, or when it’s arriving,” Moskowitz said on Thursday.
Though Moskowitz is in charge of the logistics of getting the doses to the hospitals, what happens after they get there is largely up to the healthcare systems, which will be following federal guidance.
It’s still not entirely clear how all five Florida hospitals determined eligibility for their employees to receive a dose in Phase 1 of the Pfizer rollout, though Moskowitz said federal guidelines define eligibility as those who come in high contact with COVID patients or patient areas.
Venessa Goodnow, chief pharmacy officer at Jackson Health, described the hospital network’s process of identifying those eligible last week, saying the hospital starts in the COVID wards and works its way out to employees who frequently visit them, including those from transportation and environmental service and dietary workers.
“There are a truly large number of employees that are potentially exposed to the front line with those COVID patients, so when you look at the healthcare teams, there are many members that would qualify for the first phase,” Goodnow said.
On Thursday morning, Goodnow said the health system had already identified nearly 3,000 such employees and was still in contact with others. That would still leave about 17,000 doses to be distributed to the 24 other hospitals, many of which would be presumably smaller than Jackson, the largest public hospital in the southeastern U.S.
“When we do receive the vaccine, we’re prepared to start vaccination as soon as possible,” Goodnow said on Thursday.
A QUESTION OF ETHICS
Some public-health professionals have criticized the potentially wide application of eligibility for healthcare workers in Phase 1 of the Pfizer rollout.
Howard Forman, a publichealth professor at Yale University and frequent critic of the federal government’s pandemic response, recently bashed a vaccine-distribution plan that is similar to Florida’s — in Massachusetts — because it groups healthcare workers and long-term-care residents together in the first phase, but makes high-risk individuals outside of long-term-care settings wait until the second phase.
“We should be protecting TRUE front-line health workers (not just any health care worker) & then most vulnerable, first & foremost,” Forman wrote on Twitter. “As it stands, young low-risk/low exposure healthcare workers will be protected before 80 year-olds.”
Yonatan Grad, an immunology and infectious-disease professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Miami Herald on Thursday that he can see persuasive arguments for both priorities.
The argument for vaccinating those on the front line is obvious, Grad said, but there are less obvious reasons for inoculating more people in a given healthcare system if the goal is to insulate it from a future surge of COVID patients.
For instance, Grad said social interactions between healthcare workers in a given hospital stretch across professions, and that by vaccinating more broadly, you can ensure against outbreaks.
“There are ways to argue this on both sides,” he said. “I do not know that there is really an absolutely right answer here.”