SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) – Jerry Shapiro, a 78-year-old pharmacist from Los Angeles, tops the list of Californians now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, but more than a month after the state started vaccinating, he still did not receive one.
Shapiro said he spent hours calling various health agencies and doing unsuccessful searches on computers, a familiar experience for many people in the United States, while President Joe Biden’s government was running to accelerate the chaotic and slow release of vaccines.
“Why not make it easy?” asked Shapiro, who is also concerned about his wife because of medical conditions that would make her particularly vulnerable to the virus. “Keep in your neighborhood. Make an appointment, make your attempt and that’s it. “
The United States is the country hardest hit by COVID-19, with 24.51 million cases and 409,987 deaths on Friday morning. More than 4,000 Americans died of the disease on Thursday, for the second day in a row.
Even so, the vaccine implantation, which former President Donald Trump’s government left to states to carry out without a federal project or sufficient funding, proved to be unstable.
From California, where distribution has varied from county to county, to New York, where the country’s largest city is in short supply, states and health care providers have struggled to acquire, store and distribute vaccines.
“We are consuming our stock,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio posted on Twitter on Friday. “We need more doses IMMEDIATELY so that we can protect the most vulnerable residents of our city. We need more doses so that we can fight. “
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that only 67% of healthcare professionals in New York received a dose of vaccine and warned that if the federal government does not find a way to rapidly increase production, everyone will suffer.
“Hospital staff are the people who, if they get sick, the hospital’s capacity will collapse,” Cuomo said at a news conference. “If the hospital’s capacity collapses, we have to close the economy.”
In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy said that the state’s vaccination program managed to put 70% of its vaccine supply in people’s arms, but that a federal program within the state to help nursing home residents distributed only 10% of its supply .
The country’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Friday that the federal government has assigned much of the responsibility for distributing the vaccine to state governments.
“States were doing things that were clearly not going in the right direction – and that is unfortunate,” said Fauci on CNN.
Instead, he said, the government should collaborate with states to help them plan their implementations and ensure that vaccines reach people.
DISTRIBUTION CHALLENGES
Less than half of the nearly 38 million doses of vaccines sent so far by the federal government have actually reached the Americans’ arms, reported the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday.
Some states were left behind, with only a third or 40% of their vaccines administered until Thursday, which marked the one-year anniversary of the first locally documented COVID-19 case in the United States.
A key problem is organizing the distribution of vaccines to smaller clinics and pharmacies – instead of just to large medical centers and pharmaceutical retail chains.
In California, only a handful of independent pharmacies have been able to purchase vaccines for their customers – usually only in rural areas where large chain stores are not present, said Sonya Frausto, a pharmacist in the state capital, Sacramento.
Shapiro, who owns an independent pharmacy in downtown Los Angeles, said customers have been calling daily for vaccines, but he needs to say he has no stock.
He and his wife finally made an appointment to receive the vaccine on Saturday, after repeated phone calls and hours of waiting took them to health giant Kaiser Permanente. The Shapiro are not members of the Kaiser, but the non-profit organization is offering them injections, said Jerry Shapiro.
In Sacramento, 65-year-old restaurant owner Jami Goldstene would feel much safer in his public job if he could get a vaccine. She is technically eligible because of her age, but has yet to make an appointment – or even find a way to make one – despite spending hours on the phone and on the internet.
“It is very frustrating,” she said. “I want to end this. I want to feel safe again. “
Sharon Bernstein reporting in Sacramento, California; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani in New York, Lisa Lambert in Washington, Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas, and Anurag Maan in Bengaluru; Frank McGurty and Matthew Lewis edition