There is no reason for the slow release or the doses not to be used; experts say it would never be easy to start a mass vaccination campaign during a pandemic. It takes time to vaccinate and monitor large numbers of people, and some facilities are staggering staff vaccinations to prevent many health professionals from leaving at the same time.
Supply and demand do not always align. Some of the highest priority groups – health professionals and residents of long-term care facilities – do not want the vaccine, or at least not yet. At the same time, the American Medical Association said on Friday that it was “concerned” that some health professionals not employed in hospitals or healthcare systems face difficulties in accessing the vaccine.
To speed up the process, the federal government is asking states to offer the vaccine to older people or in high-risk groups, but some areas are still focusing on the first priority groups – even if it means doses taken from the cold, storage remains unused.
“Every dose in someone’s arm is someone who will not be sick with Covid,” he said. “There is no point in trying to ration like this, week after week, because any dose placed in the refrigerator is a life that is not potentially being saved.”
Looking for people to vaccinate
This will start on Monday, when New York will open to first responders, teachers and residents aged 75 and over, in addition to prioritizing health professionals.
The frustration was already building. Last Tuesday night, nurses at the Harlem Family Health Center in New York traveled around the neighborhood trying to find people who could get the Covid-19 vaccine.
The health center had some extra doses of the Moderna vaccine that had been removed from cold storage. Doses were to be administered to healthcare professionals – but some did not attend the appointments and time was running out.
“It expires six hours after you take the first dose from the bottle,” said Calman.
That night, the nurses “went to the community and went to two open pharmacies and asked if any of the pharmacists who were there wanted the vaccine,” said Calman. “They went to a fire department, which is at the end of the street, to see if any of the people in the fire department needed a vaccine. … They went to a residential facility.”
At the end of that night, there were “three to four” doses left and they were discarded, Calman said.
“We must maintain priority levels – I think it is very important to have health professionals first and to be able to bring in teachers now and others,” said Calman. “But during that time, the community of healthcare professionals must be able to vaccinate our most at risk patients and use our professional judgment in terms of who these people are and who we can vaccinate for.”
‘We hope these issues are resolved’
Across the country, Legacy Health, a nonprofit health care system with six hospitals in Oregon and southwest Washington, confirmed to CNN on Friday that during its vaccination efforts last month, 27 doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine Covid-19 were thrown away because they expired before there was time to put them on the guns – and some initial information about the vaccine was unclear.
Brian Terrett, a spokesman for Legacy Health, told CNN in an email that Legacy Health hospitals scheduled vaccinations based on initial information, as long as each vial of the vaccine contained five doses. It turns out that some bottles contain six or seven doses – and at the time, hospitals had extra doses, but no one was scheduled or available to administer them.
Therefore, “the 27 expired doses occurred at the beginning of our vaccination effort, when we had more vaccines than patients,” said Terrett. “Having six or seven doses in a bottle has allowed us to vaccinate almost 700 more people than we have been allocated. For each expired vaccine, Legacy vaccinated almost 25 more people than we expected ”.
As reports emerge across the country of Covid-19 vaccines in some hospitals that are not used, the American Hospital Association responded in a statement that hopes “these issues will be resolved”.
The association represents and serves hospitals and healthcare networks in the United States.
“America’s hospitals and healthcare systems are working hard to deliver the COVID-19 vaccines as quickly and safely as possible, as prescribed in your state or local jurisdiction’s microplan,” said Rick Pollack, president and CEO of AHA, in statement emailed to CNN on Friday.
“At the same time, we continue to care for a large number of COVID-19 patients in very stressful circumstances, involving a lack of PPE, a lack of workers and limited ICU bed capacity in certain areas. Mass vaccination is a huge and complex – and not unlike any other effort of this kind – there are always obstacles in the way of any major government enterprise, especially in the beginning, “said Pollack in part. “We hope that these issues will be resolved and that the pace of vaccinations will increase dramatically in the coming weeks.”
Slow deployments in long-term care facilities
Vaccination for residents and staff at long-term care facilities is also slow in many places. As of Friday morning, more than 4 million doses were distributed for use in long-term care institutions, but less than 700,000 eligible individuals received their first dose.
The federal government has partnered with CVS and Walgreens to facilitate vaccination at participating long-term care facilities.
In a statement published on Wednesday, CVS said the number of residents in need of vaccination was 20-30% less than initial projections and that “initial uptake among staff is low”, although part of this may be due to the escalation of vaccination among employees.
Walgreens, meanwhile, told CNN that any unused doses are relocated to the next clinic scheduled at a long-term care facility, and any doses that may expire before that “can be used to vaccinate members of the Walgreens team who are eligible to receive vaccines as part of the Phase 1a plan outlined by the CDC and the states. “
West Virginia has led the United States in doses of vaccines administered per capita, and long-term institutions may be part of the reason. West Virginia was the only state to choose not to participate in the federal Covid-19 vaccine distribution program for employees and residents of long-term care institutions; started vaccinating people at these facilities about a week before the federal program began in other states.
More than 40% of pharmacies in West Virginia are not affiliated with a chain, and the state wanted to prioritize existing relationships, the governor said at a news conference on Dec. 16.
“Instead, we partnered with all pharmacies in West Virginia,” said Governor Jim Justice in December. “We think that, from a state perspective, it would be limiting our ability to quickly distribute and administer the vaccine to the population in need if we had followed the federal program.”
CNN’s Deidre McPhillips, Laura Ly and Naomi Thomas contributed to this report.