One of Pennsylvania’s largest healthcare networks has allowed employees’ family members to skip the COVID-19 vaccine line, raising questions of justice at a time of strong public demand and scant supply.
Geisinger’s decision to give special access to employees’ relatives received a rebuke this week from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, which said the health giant should not have maintained vaccine clinics for eligible family members of employees.
“DOH has contacted the provider to ensure that in the future, they follow the agreement they signed, or risk losing access to the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Maggi Barton, a spokesman for the Department of Health.
The state agency said it did not know that Geisinger had provided vaccinations for relatives until he was alerted by The Associated Press.
Geisinger said that since family members who received the vaccines met the state’s eligibility requirements, he did not need to tell the Department of Health that he had reserved the vaccine for them. Geisinger also insisted that he followed state guidelines for vaccine eligibility and administration and said “at no time were we told that our vaccine program could be at risk”.
Geisinger, who has 24,000 employees spread across central and northeastern Pennsylvania, held employee vaccination clinics on three consecutive Sundays in late January and early February. Each employee was allowed to bring two family members, as long as they were eligible to launch the phased vaccine in the state, Geisinger acknowledged in response to an AP inquiry. Family members did not need to live with the employee to qualify, the health system said.
About 3,600 relatives of Geisinger employees have been vaccinated with the program. There are no additional vaccine clinics scheduled for family members of employees.
“The situation in mid-January was very different from the current situation,” said Geisinger spokesman Matthew Van Stone. At the time, he said, Geisinger had an adequate supply of vaccine and “we felt that opening on Sundays to employees and up to two family members eligible for Phase 1A would make it easier for the community to find times during the week.”
It is not clear whether members of the public missed appointments due to doses administered to employees’ relatives.
But vaccine clinics have allowed family members to avoid the frustrating, tedious and often fruitless search for an appointment that undermined the state’s initial deployment and generated widespread complaints among Pennsylvania residents. The state is among the lowest in the country how efficiently they are vaccinating their population.
“Even if their intentions were good, we shouldn’t use vaccines as an ‘friends and family’ advantage at work,” said Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz, professor at the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine. “That was just prioritizing the wrong people at the wrong time.”
The health system, which runs nine hospitals and a health plan for 550,000 members, has given family members an edge at the same time as the recently expanded eligibility rules caused an increase across the state on demand.
Geisinger’s first clinic over the weekend was held on 24 January. That was five days after the state made people aged 65 and over and young people with high-risk medical conditions eligible for the vaccine. Geisinger said at the time that he was facing overwhelming demand for vaccines marked by an extremely high volume of calls and online traffic.
Linda Thorne, 65, who works at her family’s pizzeria, said she has been trying to get an appointment with Geisinger for weeks, but the health care system is not currently scheduling the first dose.
“It is really frustrating,” she said. “I see all these people my age getting very sick, and it’s scary. I don’t want to end up in the hospital in a vent. “
“I don’t think it’s fair,” said Thorne, that Geisinger accommodate family members due to a scarce supply of vaccine.
Other major health networks, including UPMC and Penn State Health, said they did not make separate arrangements for employees’ relatives to be vaccinated.
“Absolutely not,” said Brian Downs, a spokesman for the Lehigh Valley Health Network. “We followed Phase 1A (state) guidelines and from the beginning.”
The Health Department said that while Geisinger did not violate the letter of its provider contract with the state, “we hope that providers will not prioritize employees’ families over community members who are also eligible,” said the spokesman. department voice, Barry Ciccocioppo.
Federal guidelines they say that people in the same eligibility class should have equal opportunities to obtain the photos. The guidelines also say that no person should be harmed “due to social status or other socially determined circumstances.”
Nancy Kass, deputy director of public health at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, said that if Geisinger used the program for family members as a way to get more vaccine for underserved populations, she would see it as “an extremely smart strategy “to increase equity.
“If it is simply a privilege, it is not appropriate,” she said.
Kass said that while the Geisinger program is problematic, the national launch of the vaccine as a whole has been unfair because it rewards some people at the expense of others – in particular, those with the time and computer skills to find an open consultation.
Geisinger said staff and family participation in Sunday clinics was low, and started using Sundays to vaccinate patients who needed rescheduled appointments because of bad weather or shipping delays.
Vaccination of members of Geisinger’s family has been a relatively small part of his overall program. As of Monday, the health system has administered more than 112,000 doses of vaccines.