The Biden administration spent its first week in office trying to manually track 20 million doses of vaccine underway between federal distribution and clinic administration, when a dose finally reaches the patient’s arm.
The Trump administration’s strategy pushed the response to the coronavirus pandemic to individual states and omitted the pipeline tracking information between distribution and when the injection was actually administered, Biden government officials told Politico.
The lack of data has now forced federal health department officials to spend hours on the phone tracking vaccine shipments, the news website reported.
“No one had a complete view,” said Dr. Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to the Politico. “The plans that were being made were based on the assumption that more information would be available and would be revealed as soon as they reached the White House.”
As of Saturday, 49 million doses of the vaccine had been distributed by the federal government, but only 27 million administered by the states, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About two million of these doses are believed to be responsible for a 72-hour delay in the reported administration, Politico said. That still leaves millions in the pipeline between delivery and the patient. At least 16 states have used less than half the doses of the vaccine distributed to them, USA Today reported this week.
“Much of our work next week will ensure that we can tighten deadlines to understand where the vaccine really is and when exactly it is administered,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC to the USA Today.
Among the implementation problems identified by the CDC advisory committee on immunization practices are the need to improve programming, increase staff and define workflows at the administration site. States must also improve the gap between supply and demand.
In one example, a hospital in Arlington, Virginia, had to cancel 10,000 appointments after the state sent doses to county health departments. The state then instructed patients to reschedule appointments through the county’s health department as soon as they were available.
“It’s very disappointing,” said Jeff Gorsky, a resident whose February 3 appointment was canceled, told NBC4 Washington. “We are all stuck at home, I rarely leave the house now, just to shop. It would have set me free. “
Likewise, in Wisconsin, lawmakers questioned the state health department about where 180,000 vaccines distributed by the federal government that had not yet been administered were on the way, according to a report by the right-wing MacIver Institute.
A state health department official told lawmakers that there was not enough vaccine to meet demand, but also that 50% of the doses had been set aside for a pharmacy partnership to vaccinate employees and residents of long-term care homes.
But to add to the confusion, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Pharmacy Society said later that pharmacies did not receive doses from the health department and others were reserved for a second injection, despite federal guidance not to do so. “Some [the vaccine] it was being withheld for second doses, ”said Danielle Womack, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Pharmacy Society, reported the MacIver Institute. Wisconsin does not expect a vaccination programming site to go live until February, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
If the Biden government fails to control implementation, inequities can also exacerbate racial health disparities among the populations most affected by Covid-19 and already lagging behind in immunization.
An initial analysis of the 17 states and two cities that released racial analyzes by January 25 revealed that blacks everywhere are being vaccinated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below.
“We will see an increase and exacerbation of racial health inequities that existed before the pandemic and worsened during the pandemic if our communities could not access the vaccine,” said Dr. Uché Blackstock, New York emergency physician and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, a advocacy group that deals with prejudice and inequality.
This is true, although they make up an excessive percentage of the country’s health workers, who were put on the front lines when the campaign started in mid-December.
For example, in North Carolina, blacks make up 22% of the population and 26% of the health workforce, but only 11% of those vaccinated so far. Whites, a category in which the state includes both Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites, are 68% of the population and 82% of those vaccinated.
The racial immunization gap is partly explained by higher levels of distrust of medical personnel by racial minorities who have for centuries been subject to abusive and discriminatory medical practices.
However, it is also a practical matter. In Florida, a plan to distribute Covid-19 vaccines through pharmacies with the Publix supermarket chain – which has shown to cluster in wealthy communities – has left Belle Glade residents 25 miles from the nearest vaccine center.
Most residents of the predominantly black community “walk wherever they go,” said Mayor Steve Wilson. Subsequently, the state provided a vaccine site for the community.
The CDC’s first report on the early launch of the vaccine is expected in February.
The Associated Press contributed to this report