Officials frustrated with vaccine distribution
Berks County officials are frustrated with they way Pennsylvania is distributing COVID vaccines.
At a weekly board meeting Thursday, commissioners Chairman Christian Y. Leinbach vented some of those frustrations.
He said the focus on funneling vaccines to pharmacies has created a fractured system and placed needless roadblocks in the way of establishing countyrun community vaccination sites that could get shots into the arms of thousands each day.
“Pharmacies are only vaccinating 20 people a day,” he said. “They are struggling to do both their business of fulfilling prescriptions and performing vaccinations. They are not set up for mass vaccination.”
On the other hand, he said, there are counties with mass vaccination sites that cannot get enough vaccines.
Leinbach said he took part in a conference call with state Department of Health officials this week about the vaccination distribution strategy in the commonwealth. He was not pleased with what he heard.
“They are not investing the time and energy at this point in mass vaccination sites,” he said. “The argument from them is that this is an equity issue.”
He said Randy Padfield, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, told those on the call that the mass vaccination sites are primarily helping white, middle-class people.
“I was offended by this,” he said, adding that county officials pushed back on that assertion. “It is much easier to protect our most vulnerable citizens with a mass vaccination site working with partners like the Berks Community Health Center than it is to deal with a fractured system of pharmacists throughout the county.”
Brian Gottschall, director of Berks County Department of Emergency Services, said understanding the distribution strategy at the state level is making the prospect of creating a community COVID vaccination site much harder.
“We’re taking some leaps of faith and trying to do things we believe are going to best serve Berks County citizens without any clear commitment from the state that we are going to have it pay off,” he said. Gottschall said he believes counties have greater insight into the needs of their communities than pharmacies.
“We know how to do this — we do this with access to recovery centers after natural disasters. We do this with distribution of food and water in scenarios where we have those kind of shortages,” he said. “And we understand how to get those things to people who are economically disadvantaged.”
Gottschall stressed that he believes pharmacies should continue to distribute vaccines but said the state needs to recognize the strengths counties could bring to ramping up these efforts.
Leinbach said his colleagues feel the same way, noting that county officials from across the commonwealth are united in their frustration with the lack of communication and coordination coming from the state.
“We are unified in challenging the administration to change their distribution strategy to start focusing on mass vaccination sites,” he said, adding that the county COVID leadership team will be sharing these frustrations with Gov. Tom Wolf on a conference call Friday morning.
Rolling Hills Landfill
The commissioners also approved an agreement resolving all disputes and issues between the county and the Delaware County Solid Waste Authority over the plan to expand the life of the Rolling Hills Landfill.
The county had filed a lawsuit to stop the authority from building higher berms around the landfill and placing trash in empty airspace on the 162 acres designated for waste disposal by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. That move would extend the life of Rolling Hills by more than 10 years.
The lawsuit, which alleged the authority violated a contract between Berks and Delaware regarding expansion of the landfill, was filed in Chester County Court after residents from Boyertown voiced displeasure with the truck traffic that would come along with the landfill expansion proposal.
Commissioner Kevin S. Barnhardt opposed the motion, saying that he has a philosophical issue with the fact that Berks is the site of numerous landfills that take trash from other counties.
“I just think it’s not in the best interest of the environment and the community here in Berks County,” he said.
Leinbach supported the motion, noting that Boyertown has worked out a financial compromise with the authority to allow for the expansion and that the terms of the settlement should be viewed as a win for the county.
He said the county got everything that they asked for in the lawsuit. That includes the complete repayment of past host fees to the county in excess of $1 million, the guarantee that the county has the right to approve any future expansion and the repayment of all legal fees associated with the lawsuit.
“From where I sit, the county did the right thing,” he said. “We stuck to our guns and were able, in the end, to be in a position where Boyertown has what their leaders were looking for and the county has protected our taxpayers.”