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Although widely hailed as a success, the Philly FEMA vaccination site at the Pennsylvania Convention Center is still discovering the best way to distribute the remaining COVID-19 vaccine from its 6,000 missed appointments daily.
The City of Centro Vaccination Center, as it is called, ends each day with a 4 to 11% non-attendance rate, according to Department of Health spokesman Jim Garrow – meaning that between 230 and 660 doses have the potential to not be used at the end of each day.
During the clinic’s first week, site workers used an ad hoc situation to place the surplus in people’s arms.
One way was through telephone calls the same day, in which the Department of Health calls eligible people on their vaccine interest record to see if they can come to the site immediately. If people say yes, they are given a password to use when they show up, so the clinic staff knows they have been invited.
“We monitor the non-attendance rate throughout the day and estimate how many unused doses we will have at the end of the day,” said Garrow, in order to know how many people to call.
Even after last-minute invitations, not all of the remaining doses are guaranteed, so part of the vaccine is going to eligible Philadelphia residents, who just show up at the end of the day and wait.
“We tell people that this is not a walking clinic, but at the end of the day, if we still have appointments, our team will go out and do an immediate screening of the people who are there,” said Garrow. “They need to prove that they live in Philadelphia, they need to prove that they are in 1A or 1B.”
Authorities are currently working to formalize a process to distribute the remaining doses in a fair and equitable manner, according to Garrow. To fill vacancies, employees will first contact the vaccine distributors in the community to see if they need to fill extra vacancies. If there are still leftovers at the end of the day, they will allow visits – but that is never guaranteed, he said.
Some Convention Center officials gave conflicting messages to aspirants on foot.
Philadelphia chef Ange Branca, who is of Malay descent, posted on Instagram last week about her experience in trying to secure a remaining vaccine. As a member of the restaurant industry, Branca meets Phase 1B eligibility criteria for essential workers. But when she showed up and asked about taking one of the unused doses, she was almost sent home without being allowed to wait for an injection.
She persisted, asking a different employee, and was eventually led to join what she called a line of predominantly white people, who told her they had been given the green light to wait.
“It occurred to me that initially I may have been prevented from gaining access to the vaccine based on the color of my skin,” wrote Branca in an open letter to the Department of Health, which she posted on Instagram. “It bothered me a lot that everyone else on the line was instructed to do this correctly by the Marines at the entrance, while they gave me false information and rejected me.”
Garrow said employees received the letter from Branca and immediately reviewed the procedures with the line team to ensure that all candidates were treated the same. He also apologized.
“We hope that the situation that Ange was forced to face is simply a matter of a line team not being up to date on the latest procedures and nothing more, and we sincerely apologize for being misdirected,” Garrow told Billy Penn.
The city is trying to narrow the racial gap between vaccine recipients – and that is part of the reason why authorities want to stop the crowd after hours. The waiting line tends to be younger and whiter, said Garrow.
The health department listed three main reasons why doses end up not being used:
- Residents with non-Philadelphia postal codes who have made an appointment in some way are instantly canceled.
- Other people have given several other reasons for the cancellation – and sometimes people just don’t show up
- Some people by appointment do not receive vaccines due to medical problems, such as a possible allergic reaction
The news quickly circulated about the supply of leftover doses on the FEMA website, attracting some ineligible people to the Central City Vaccine Center who were eventually rejected.
And just as the scheduling registration links were widely publicized, despite strict instructions not to share them with friends or family, the same is happening with the same day passwords, which entitle the user to an “orange ticket” that it’s your way to get the jab.
“I think it would be naive to believe that these passwords are not being shared,” said Garrow, but Department of Health officials are reminding people not to share them. “This is an act of extreme balance”, he added, with the aim of bringing vaccines to “more people, but most of prioritized people. “