Pa. starts giving shots to teachers

Wolf administration criticized for absence from vaccine hearing

HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania COVID-19 vaccine rollout branched out Wednesday as teachers started getting shots as a specially recognized group, while lawmakers blasted the Wolf administration for failing to show up at a hearing on getting vaccine to seniors.

Health Department spokesperson Barry Ciccocioppo said vaccination sites at some state intermediate units for teachers and other education and child care workers — designated by Gov. Tom Wolf last week as a special vaccination group — opened Wednesday. Others were to open Thursday and Friday.

But Ciccocioppo said low supply in the face of high demand continued to hamper the state’s vaccine rollout.

“That is creating, we understand, headaches and frustration for people trying to make appointments,” Ciccocioppo said.

Nonetheless, he said, the department is “moving in the right direction” because weekly vaccine allocations from the federal government are increasing.

The overall vaccine effort remains in phase 1A, which includes more than 4 million residents — everyone ages 65 and older, younger people with serious health issues, health care workers and residents of longterm care facilities among them.

It has been hamstrung in part by low supply.

Ciccocioppo illustrated that by citing a weekly survey of vaccine providers. He said the Health Department asked for 424,570 first doses of the two-shot Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for the upcoming week, but the latest federal allocation was only 254,150 doses.

The teacher-specific effort also faces limitations.

It taps a separate vaccine supply, the recently approved one-shot version from Johnson & Johnson. Ciccocioppo noted the state has received only a single allotment of 95,000 doses.

More is not expected before the end of the month.

But Pennsylvania’s rollout also has been criticized by lawmakers from both parties. And this week, the Health Department — led for about six weeks by acting Secretary Alison Beam — faced criticism from populous suburban Philadelphia counties.

Leaders there claim their jurisdictions got less than their proportionate share of vaccine than other places, and they weren’t satisfied after a weekend phone conference with Beam.

“There are people throughout Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware and Chester counties who should have already been vaccinated,” Bucks County Republican Rep. Frank Farry said. “The planning of this distribution has lacked transparency; it’s been a disaster.”

Health Department absent from hearing

Republican Rep. Gary Day of Lehigh County and several fellow committee members harshly criticized Beam’s department for skipping a legislative public hearing on the vaccine rollout for senior citizens.

Day, Republican chairperson of the Aging and Older Adult Services Committee, also said lawmakers and residents should be concerned that Beam declined to accept a phone call from Day that he pledged to limit to six minutes.

“It is a huge development that the secretary of health has declined to come and declined to send anyone,” Day said at the hearing.

Others committee members echoed Day. Republican Rep. Frank Ryan of Lebanon County called the department’s absence “incredibly disappointing,” and Republican Rep. Mark Gillen of Berks County said it would help foster a lack of confidence in government.

Ciccocioppo acknowledged the department was unable to participate.

But, he said, “We have participated in numerous hearings in the past few weeks, specific to the vaccine rollout.”

Those who testified included representatives of CVS Health and Walgreens. Both are working with the federal government to vaccinate people in long-term care facilities.

Bryan Lowe, a regional executive for Walgreens, said the company will finish its delivery of vaccinations in the Pennsylvania skilled nursing homes it works with by the end of the week. Dave Dederichs, a CVS Health executive, said his company also was close to finishing work in skilled nursing homes.

Both executives said their companies are making progress in vaccinations in assisted living centers, which are considered a separate group of facilities. Lowe said Walgreens would be mostly finished in those facilities by March 19, while Dederichs said significant progress has been made in that group.

Those comments referred only to long-term care facilities outside of Philadelphia. Those in Philadelphia are classified separately.

Democratic Rep. Dan Williams of Chester County said the rollout appeared to be suffering from “a of poverty ideas.” He suggested stronger consideration of mobile vaccination units that could be used in difficult-to-reach parts of the state.

The suggestion was welcomed by Margie Zelenak, executive director of the Pennsylvania Assisted Living Association, a testifier who said the National Guard could staff such a unit.

Zachary Shamberg, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Health Care Association, noted that Thursday would mark the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic.

Shamberg, whose organization represents many long-term care facilities, said it still has many of the same questions on the vaccine rollout that it had in February.

County vaccine allocation factors

At a news briefing separate from the hearing, Ciccocioppo said the state doles out vaccine to counties based on a weighted formula with four factors.

The weights, he said, are 30% on number of county residents 65 or older; 20% on county population; 30% on number of COVID-related deaths; and 20% on number of COVID-19 cases.

He also acknowledged growing talk of the need for mass vaccination clinics.

“We are making plans with all the county officials to set up and be prepared to set up — community vaccination clinics is what we are calling them — to provide mass vaccinations when there is more vaccine available,” he said. “There still is not enough to set up the kind of mass vaccination clinics that people are clamoring for.”

Ciccocioppo said a key indicator of how well Pennsylvania is doing in its vaccine rollout is the raw number of shots administered. On Wednesday — according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website — that figure was 3.63 million, ranking Pennsylvania sixth among states.

In population-rated terms, though, Pennsylvania ranked 34th among states, with 28,418 shots administered per 100,000 residents.

Morning Call Capitol correspondent Ford Turner can be reached at fturner@mcall.com.