Many Americans logged on to websites before dawn, waited in long lines and drove for hours to get Covid’s vaccines.
Still, in nursing homes, the experience was the opposite: about 60% of employees at long-term care institutions refused injections, said Rick Gates, senior vice president of pharmacy and health at Walgreens. He said that about 20% of residents refused vaccines.
“We were seeing hesitation about the vaccine – especially among those working at these facilities – which was bigger than we expected,” he said at CNBC’s Healthy Returns virtual event on Tuesday.
Walgreens and CVS Health were chosen by the federal government to administer vaccines to residents and employees at thousands of long-term care facilities across the country. Residents in nursing homes and senior citizens were at the top of the priority list, along with health professionals, because they had a disproportionate number of Covid-19 outbreaks and deaths.
The decline in vaccines indicates another challenge that the country will face, especially as pharmacies and community clinics receive more doses of the vaccine: persuading most Americans to take the life-saving vaccine that will help protect the general public and allow the economy gradually returns to a degree of normality.
Gates said the excess vaccine from long-term institutions was eventually returned to the states or given to other high-priority people.
Beginning Friday, Walgreens will offer vaccines in select stores in 15 states, along with the jurisdictions of Chicago and New York, as part of a federal pharmacy program. He will administer vaccines to priority groups in these stores, such as older Americans or people with health problems.
Gates said the pharmacy chain hopes to take a bigger role in the vaccination effort, but said “vaccine availability is the biggest obstacle”. He said he expects the doses to be more widely available to the general public in all Walgreens stores in late March or early April.
Judy Druin is vaccinated by pharmacist Joe Borge in Danvers, MA on February 1, 2021. On the first day of Phase 2 of the launch of COVID-19, elderly people aged 75 and over are vaccinated at Walgreens Pharmacy on 107 High Street in Danvers.
Pat Greenhouse | Boston Globe | Getty Images