* WBEZ …
Four weeks of COVID-19 vaccination in Illinois nursing homes, nearly 80% of the campaign doses are waiting to be used, but the drugstore chains that do the work say everything is going according to plan.
CVS Health and Walgreens administered only 110,403 of the 550,050 doses Illinois received for residents and employees of long-term care facilities, according to state public health data published on Monday. […]
“The distribution of vaccines to long-term care settings, where the most vulnerable population resides, is not fast enough and should, should improve,” said Karen Messer, head of LeadingAge Illinois, which lobbies for 380 community care locations , mainly non-profit. […]
“You have a captive population in these facilities,” said [Dr. Ronald Hershow, who directs epidemiology and biostatistics in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health], who is part of a team that advises IDPH on COVID-19 responses. “It doesn’t look like it should be as logistically difficult as [vaccinating] the general population. ” […]
“Our effort to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to the long-term care community in Illinois is going according to plan and in close coordination with the state,” said the CVS statement.
The feds established this public-private partnership program without, apparently, making sure that Walgreens and CVS had the ability to actually do their job (typical DC throughout this farce). The state determined that pharmaceutical companies should first vaccinate qualified nursing home residents / employees, because that is where the highest mortality rates are. The effort started a month ago. Pharmacy chains finally ended the first round only in the facilities of qualified nursing homes yesterday, according to the governor’s office. And much more remains to be done, as evidenced by the fact that only one fifth of the available doses have been administered. For them, saying things are going as planned is just ridiculous. Nobody planned this unscrupulous delay.
Pharmacies have been so slow, in fact, that the state has decided to vaccinate residents of state veterans’ homes and some DHS facilities instead of waiting at Walgreens and CVS.
If you can’t handle the task, ask for help, for God’s sake. And stop pointing fingers and overshadow the problem. The problem is with you. Go ahead.
The feds need to intervene immediately and review these contracts or ensure that companies get the help they need.
Ridiculous.
… Adding… Florida …
After nearly three weeks of vaccinating residents and staff at Florida’s long-term care facilities, CVS and Walgreens will no longer be part of these vaccinations, according to an update by the state Health Care Administration Agency.
There are more than 321,000 residents and employees at these facilities across Florida, according to the AHCA. In late December, CVS and Walgreens pharmacies were selected by the federal government to help vaccinate these vulnerable populations. However, starting on January 23, vaccinations in LTCs were taken over by a state program.