Covid’s US vaccination effort falls far short of original estimates. More than 15.4 million doses have been delivered to the states, but only 4.5 million Americans have received their first injection according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Providence Hospital System, however, defied the country’s slow-release trend and gave the first dose of the vaccine to more than half of its 120,000 employees in 51 hospitals in seven states.
Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, Providence’s chief clinical director, told The News with Shepard Smith that “planning is the antidote to panic.” She said Providence began creating strategies in September to identify caregivers at greatest risk and how to integrate technologies such as e-mails and text messages to streamline the implementation process.
She explained to host Shepard Smith that one of the solutions was to build a “validation and verification” tool to manage the distribution of vaccines in the provider’s hospitals. The tool contained “functions” that consisted of specific jobs and also contained the workplaces of those within the Providence system. People, in turn, would seek and validate the data.
“Because we did that, we really got around a lot of the consternation you heard about from other organizations that, inadvertently, despite your best intentions, left out key groups of people who should be immunized,” said Compton-Phillips. “So I think the biggest lesson we would have is don’t hesitate to start doing something, some immunizations are better than none. Also, ask your people, make sure you listen to them, don’t just trust the data.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar estimated that 20 million Americans “could be” vaccinated by the end of December and another 50 million “could be” vaccinated by the end of January. He added that “we expect” a total of 100 million vaccinations by the end of February.
CDC officials attributed the slow implementation to complex vaccination storage, strained public health departments and health care providers and the timing of vaccination implementation in the midst of holidays.
Federal authorities have given states the responsibility for implementing vaccination campaigns. On Monday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo acknowledged that his state’s hospitals need to administer vaccines more quickly and threatened fines.
“Any provider that does not use the vaccine can be fined up to $ 100,000 going forward, they have to use the allocation within seven days. Otherwise, they can be removed from future distribution,” said Cuomo.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a similar warning to hospitals and said the state could seek to convert test sites into vaccination centers. California Governor Gavin Newsom Prometheus $ 300 million in funding for vaccination efforts in its current budget proposal.
The successful implementation of Providence further identified areas that needed improvement. One in five frontline nurses at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, California, refused the injection, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Compton-Phillips noted that the hospital is located in an underserved area and deals with a large immigrant community. She said Providence is trying to understand what the barriers to vaccination are to better serve the community.
“We know that there is hesitation about the vaccine, particularly in certain underserved communities, communities of color that have less confidence in the health system, so we are making a deep partnership with them to understand these concerns and make sure that we are addressing them so that we can really convince people to do what is best for them, which is to protect themselves from this virus, “said Compton-Phillips.