Vaccination race in US off to slow, messy start; Wisconsin hospital worker arrested for spoiled shots
The race to vaccinate millions of Americans is off to a slower, messier start than public health officials and leaders of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed had expected.
Overworked, underfunded state public health departments are scrambling to patch together plans for administering vaccines. Counties and hospitals have taken different approaches, leading to long lines, confusion, frustration and jammed phone lines. A multitude of logistical concerns have complicated the process of trying to beat back the scourge that has killed over 340,000 Americans.
Dr. Ashish Jha, a health policy researcher and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said the main problem is that states are not getting adequate financial or technical support from the federal government. Jha said the Trump administration, principally the Department of Health and Human Services, has set states up to fail.
“There’s a lot states still need to do,” he said, “but you need a much more active role from the federal government than what they have been willing to do. They’ve largely said to states, ‘This is your responsibility. Figure it out.’”
Lags in reporting vaccination numbers explain in part why many states aren’t meeting their year-end goals, but officials blame logistical and financial hurdles for the slow pace.
Many states lack the money to hire personnel, pay for overtime or reach out to the public. The equipment required to keep the vaccines cold complicates their distribution. Also, providers need to track vaccinations so they have enough to dispense the required second doses 21 days after the first.
In other developments:
- Authorities arrested a suburban Milwaukee pharmacist Thursday suspected of deliberately ruining hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccine by removing it from refrigeration for two nights.
- Republican Sen. David Perdue was forced into quarantine Thursday in the home stretch of Georgia’s high-stakes Senate runoffs, disclosing just five days before the election that he had been exposed to a campaign worker infected with the coronavirus.
- The World Health Organization says it has cleared the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, meaning poorer countries may soon get access to the shot already available in Europe and North America.
- People exposed to a coronavirus patient who stay well for 10 days still have a 7% chance of getting sick, but a U.S. government recommendation on shorter quarantines is not changing.
- The University of Michigan’s Big House has been transformed into The Big Vaccine Clinic. A few hundred University of Michigan medical professionals and students who work in health care settings received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday at Michigan Stadium, one of the nation’s largest sporting venues.
