WASHINGTON – Before the increase in vaccines available next month, the Biden government has been taking control of an increasing number of doses, bypassing state programs in an attempt to bring vaccines to black, Latin and low-income communities.
But after less than five weeks to reshape the system they inherited from the Trump administration, the Biden plan to use federally administered pharmacies and mass vaccination sites could be tested by a new wave of doses.
“There is a lot of untapped capacity out there,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at New York University who advised Biden’s transition. “I think there is a huge potential for scaling up through retail pharmacies. It has been much more focused so far, but once the supply is open, they will be targeted at the most at-risk populations, but also expanding more broadly. ”
On Thursday, President Joe Biden scored the 50 millionth vaccine with an event at the White House that included a four-person television vaccine administration – a teacher, a grocery manager, a paramedic and a fireman.
“What I will say to the American people is this: if – if – the FDA approves the use of this new vaccine, we have a plan to implement it as soon as Johnson & Johnson can do it,” said Biden. “We will use every conceivable form to expand vaccine manufacturing and make even faster progress on general vaccines in March.”
Pfizer and Moderna have increased production and Johnson & Johnson is on its way to obtain FDA authorization for emergency use for its single dose vaccine over the weekend – after which the manufacturer said it will send 20 million doses to the US market in a few weeks.
If manufacturers fulfill their projections, the United States will have enough doses to vaccinate 4 million people a day by the end of March, compared to the current rate of about 1.5 million vaccines a day.
The next test for the Biden government is whether it can successfully ensure that these doses reach the manufacturers in people’s arms at increasing rates and meet its goal of ensuring that the hardest-hit communities are not left behind.
The United States will also want to avoid problems like those that arise in other countries, such as Germany, which acknowledged on Wednesday that it has 1 million doses stored because people are reluctant to get vaccinated.
Unlike the Trump administration, which allocated doses of vaccine to states based on population size and left it up to local authorities to decide how to distribute vaccines, the new administration has directed more doses to community health centers, administered mass vaccination sites. by the federal government and retail pharmacies aimed specifically at minority and low-income communities, administration officials said.
So far, only 9 percent of those who received the vaccine were Hispanic and 6 percent were black, according to CDC data. Hispanics represent 19% of the total population of the United States and blacks 13%.
Even among health professionals, the first group to receive the vaccine, whites were disproportionately more vaccinated than blacks and Hispanics, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
To try to reverse this trend, the federal government this month began sending doses of vaccines directly to retail pharmacies with the initial locations selected for their ability to reach “socially vulnerable communities,” said Jeffrey Zients, Covid-19 administration coordinator. Last week, 2 million doses went straight to pharmacies while 13.5 million went to the states.
Walgreens said it will begin receiving a weekly allocation of about 500,000 doses of vaccine per week, with about half of them going to stores in what the federal government has identified as “medically underserved areas” and areas with vulnerable social populations, said a spokesman for Walgreens.
After using pharmacies to reach low-income areas, delivery through retailers is expected to be expanded nationally as soon as more injections are available. Albertsons grocery store, for example, said it has the ability to administer 150,000 doses a day and handle about 90 percent more than it received. CVS said its 10,000 stores will be able to deliver 5 to 6 million injections per week, but are now receiving only 500,000 doses per week.
Part of the challenge, as more doses are delivered, will be helping people find out which pharmacy has the doses and how people can make appointments. CDC is partnering with other healthcare providers on Vaccinefinder.org, a website where people can enter their zip code and see where vaccines are available.
The site was created by Boston Children’s Hospital to help families find flu shots, but it has been converted to a Covid-19 vaccine site that gets data directly from pharmacies. Currently, it offers information in only four states.
Government officials said this month that they would send 1 million doses of vaccine directly to 250 federally funded community health centers that serve hard-to-reach groups, such as homeless people, migrant workers and residents of public homes.
The government has also set up vaccination centers in minority-majority neighborhoods in Oakland, California and Los Angeles, each administering more than 4,000 vaccines a day, coming directly from the federal vaccine supply. She plans to open four additional federal vaccination sites in the next two weeks in Florida – near Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville – with large populations of black and Latino residents.
“The selection of all of these sites is based on a CDC, a FEMA framework that was developed to target vaccination to those who are most vulnerable,” said Andy Slavitt, the White House senior adviser on the response to the pandemic, when announcing the sites. . “The goal is to launch vaccination posts that use processes and are in places that promote equity.”
And he acknowledged that in some cases, people outside the communities have scheduled appointments, said Slavitt.
“People from outside these communities – outside the most affected communities – arrive, make appointments and often take some of these doses, which we shouldn’t be surprised at – this happens in a shortage,” said Slavitt during a press briefing last week. “But we have to act on that because we are purposefully setting up both sites that are conveniently located in those communities.”
At a vaccination site that opened this week in Dallas’ Fair Park with military and federal officials and targeted minority neighborhoods, only about 18,000 residents in eligible postal codes had registered for the vaccine on Monday – 3,000 less than the total number of FEMA could be vaccinated in a week, The Dallas Morning News reported.
Slavitt said the federal government is working on ways to improve the booking system and other issues that could become obstacles for people living in these communities, such as transportation and limited consultation hours.
States also complained about the lack of coordination, as the federal government takes a stronger role, according to a bipartisan group of governors who sent a letter to the government this month.
Governors said that due to lack of communication, some pharmacies received doses from both the state and federal government.
“If the federal government distributes independently of the states to these same entities, without state coordination and consultation, redundancy and inefficiency may well happen,” said the letter.