Slow vaccine rollout stirs anger, frustration
Diane Kearns sat at her old-school wooden desk, black hair pulled into a ponytail and face devoid of makeup, and prepared to go to war.
The Austin, Texas, mother of three was fiercely focused on one thing: finding a COVID-19 vaccine for her 18-yearold son, Dean, whose disabilities include cerebral palsy, seizure disorder and legal blindness.
Kearns picked up her phone on Dec. 30 and called 15 grocery stores that had received vaccines. She called Dean’s doctor. She called pharmacies.
They were out of vaccine. They served only first responders. They took only current patients. They accepted only people on waiting lists.
She kept calling, knowing she’d be on hold for a while.
“That anger drives a lot of my action,” Kearns said.
Anger and frustration are surging across the country as the federal government leaves states to handle the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
Through Friday, states had received 22.1 million doses of the vaccines. Of those, about 6.7 million – less than onethird – had been administered.
The American Hospital Association has estimated that 1.8 million people need to be vaccinated daily from Jan. 1 to May 31 to reach widespread immunity by the summer. The current pace is more than 1 million people per day below that.
Poor messaging and inconsistent procedures are forcing people to scramble on their own to find vaccines.
For a 71-year-old Florida man and his 66-year-old wife, the chaos meant rising before dawn to get in line for a vaccine, only to be turned away after learning many of the supplies had been given out to people who’d camped overnight, against the express wishes of authorities.
Federal officials point to a host of reasons for the lag in vaccine distributions, including vaccination systems still gearing up, federal funding that hasn’t yet been disbursed to states and a requirement that states set aside vaccines for long-term-care facilities.
States lament a lack of clarity on how many doses they will receive and when. They say more resources should have been devoted to education campaigns to ease concerns among people leery of getting the shots. And although the federal government recently approved $8.7 billion for the vaccine effort, it will take time to reach places that could have used the money months ago to prepare to deliver shots more efficiently.
“The recurring theme is the lack of a national strategy and the attempt to pass the buck down the line, lower and lower, until the poor people at the receiving end have nobody else that they can send the buck to,” said Gianfranco Pezzino, who was the public health officer in Shawnee County, Kansas, until retiring last month.
President-elect Joe Biden on Friday
called the rollout a “travesty,” noting the lack of a national plan to get doses into arms and reiterating his commitment to administer 100 million shots in his first 100 days. His office announced a plan to release most doses right away, rather than holding second doses in reserve, the more conservative approach taken by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration defined its primary role as developing coronavirus vaccines and delivering them to states, which would then take over and ensure that vaccine doses traveled “the last mile” into arms. Each state had to develop its own plan, including issuing guidelines for who gets vaccinated first. Several health experts complained about that approach, saying it led to confusion and a patchwork response.
In Florida, for example, seniors 65 and older are in the first phase of vaccine distribution. In Texas, seniors and medically fragile people are in the second phase. In New York, they are in the third phase.
Several public health officials and experts say they believe some of the early glitches are smoothing out. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said the slow start should not be surprising given the immense scale of the task. “It was not going to be seamless,” he said.
Some states are getting creative. Oregon held a mass vaccination event at the state fairgrounds with the help of the National Guard. The governor said it aimed to vaccinate 250 people per hour. New Jersey planned to open six vaccine “megasites” where officials hope more than 2,000 people per day can eventually get their shots.
But without a federal plan, such efforts can amount to “throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks,” said Chrissie Juliano of the Big Cities Health Coalition, which represents metropolitan health departments.
Kearns remains optimistic. She guesses Dean will get his vaccine in February. The rest of the family will just have to wait their turn.
Contributing: Associated Press