Carla K. Johnson and Nicky Forster did some somewhat counterintuitive reports this morning for the Associated Press, looking at figures that suggest that some of the states that tried to boost vaccinations the fastest actually ended up with a slower distribution of the vaccine.
How is this possible? The explanation, in the opinion of experts, is that the rapid expansion of eligibility in states like South Carolina and Florida has caused an increase in demand that is too big to be managed and has led to serious disorder. Vaccine supplies have proved insufficient or unpredictable, websites have failed and telephone lines have become congested, spreading confusion, frustration and resignation among many people. They have now vaccinated smaller portions of their population than those that moved more slowly and methodically, such as Hawaii and Connecticut.
“The infrastructure was simply not ready. The shot backfired, ”said Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious doctor and health data specialist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. She added: “In their haste to satisfy everyone, governors satisfied few and frustrated many.”
The findings may contain an important lesson for the country’s governors, many of whom have announced dramatic expansions in their implementations in the past few days after being challenged by President Joe Biden to make all adults eligible for vaccination by May 1. “
If you are more focused and focused, you can do a better job, ”said Sema Sgaier, executive director of Surgo Ventures, a nonprofit health data organization that conducted the analysis in collaboration with the Associated Press. “You can open it if you have set up the infrastructure to vaccinate all of these people quickly.”
“It got a little chaotic,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, medical director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers. “We create much more demand than supply. This stressed the system and may have made the system less efficient. “
Plescia said the analysis suggests that “a more methodical, measured, judicious and priority-based approach, despite people’s perceptions, can be just as efficient, or more efficient, than opening things up and making them available to more people” .
In retrospect, health professionals and nursing home residents were the easy groups to vaccinate. Doses could be delivered to them where they lived and worked.
“We knew where they were and who they were,” said Wurtz. Once the states went beyond these populations, it became more difficult to find the right people.