Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine spoke with PennLive on Thursday about the effort to vaccinate state residents against COVID-19 and said, “We want to do more and better.”
In an interview with PennLive’s editorial board, Levine said he hopes to announce new tactics towards that goal soon, including making vaccines available at retail pharmacies and maintaining vaccination clinics, including what she called “mass vaccination clinics” . The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency will be involved, she said.
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Levine also said he will align Pennsylvania’s vaccination priorities with new ones announced by the federal government this week. The federal government is advising states to make the vaccine available immediately to all people over 65, as well as people aged 16 and over who have chronic medical conditions.
This means that vaccines can be offered to all Pennsylvania senior citizens much earlier than seemed likely earlier in the week, when the state was following a phased approach that focused on frontline health care workers and elderly people in nursing homes. . The state announced on Thursday morning a temporary layoff that will allow people to be vaccinated in pharmacies without a prescription. However, it is necessary to have a sufficient supply of vaccines.
Levine told PennLive on Thursday morning that she did not immediately know when vaccines would be offered to all Pennsylvania residents over 65.
Noting the federal recommendation to do this came on Tuesday, Levine said: “What we are trying to do is find out exactly how we are going to do this, because it is a big change from what they recommended before.”
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Asked when she expects the vaccine to become available to the public, Levine said: “It may be early summer … but let’s say, optimistically, late spring.”
Still, Levine emphasized that getting the vaccine to everyone who wants it is a complicated task, and she hopes it will take “well into the fall” to complete groups like healthy young adults, college students and children.
In the interview with PennLive’s editorial board, Levine was pressured about the successful implementation of the vaccine in Pennsylvania – based on federal data, the state appears to be behind many others.
According to federal data on Thursday morning, Pennsylvania received more than one million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and distributed about 380,000 of them. Its rate of administered doses, about 3 per 100 people, places it in the middle of the card between the states. The main state, West Virginia, administered more than double the doses, about 6.2 per 100 residents.
Levine said vaccination in Pennsylvania is a complicated process with, for example, Philadelphia conducting its own vaccination effort and a federal partnership with CVS and Walgreens dealing with vaccines in long-term care facilities. She said it may take up to three days for the doses administered to be reported. She further said that the federal government lists vaccines as being distributed to Pennsylvania before they actually arrived, suggesting that the number of unused doses in the state, about 600,000 on Thursday morning, is not so high.
Levine acknowledged that Pennsylvania is “in the middle of the pack” in delivering vaccines.
But she also said, “I think that all states are pretty much in the same boat.”
She also cited holiday delays – the national vaccination process started about a week before Christmas.
“But now in the New Year, both in Pennsylvania and across the country, we continue to grow and do much better,” she said.
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