LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A former Arkansas health officer is warning about the pace of coronavirus vaccines being administered to residents of long-term care facilities under a U.S. plan that puts major CVS and Walgreens drugstore chains in charge of many of the vaccines.
Less than 10% of the doses allocated to Arkansas seniors have been administered, according to the state health department. The two pharmacies are operating in about 40% of units in the state. Some of them were told they were scheduled for February or March, said Dr. Joe Thompson, a former Arkansas general surgeon and executive director of the Arkansas Health Improvement Center.
“This is not acceptable,” said Thompson. “We are seeing a failure to implement CVS and Walgreens.”
Federal health officials in recent days have asked that they expand the vaccine’s eligibility to tens of millions of Americans to accelerate the launch of the national inoculation program. Meanwhile, the elderly in some long-term care facilities – which account for about 1% of the US population, but 40% of COVID-19 deaths and should be on the front lines – are still waiting.
State and local officials and long-term care providers in states such as Florida, California, Arizona, Indiana and Pennsylvania told Reuters that they turned to alternative providers to vaccinate their residents or employees because pharmacy chains were scheduling vaccines weeks in advance .
About 75,000 long-term care facilities have signed up to receive vaccines from CVS Health Corp and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc under the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Pharmacy Partnership Program.
“I think they face serious bandwidth issues in terms of scheduling,” said David Grabowski, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a health policy expert. “I find it very distressing that we didn’t do this more quickly. This is really a matter of life and death. “
Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, in a statement on Thursday, said the two drugstore chains assured him that all long-term care residents assigned to them would be vaccinated by the end of this month.
Many states have prioritized homes with patients who needed medical care, which contributed to delays in other long-term care facilities.
CVS said it plans to end all injections at the designated facility within nine to 12 weeks after the first dose. This means that states like California, Florida, Arizona, Alabama, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, which were among the last to activate the second phase of the facility’s vaccinations, may not be completed until April.
“State decisions about which facilities are activated when they have a significant impact on time,” said CVS spokesman TJ Crawford, noting that the company administered 1 million doses and is up to date with its federal agreement.
Other obstacles included confirmation of vaccine availability, winter vacations, vaccine hesitation and new outbreaks of COVID-19, the companies said.
This resulted in “a slightly slower start than we expected. Now that we’re past the first day of the year, you’re seeing rapid and rapid acceleration, ”said Rick Gates, senior vice president of pharmacy and health at Walgreens. The company has taken more than 500,000 photos and expects to be done by March.
‘SUPPRESSED BY SHEER’S VOLUME’
Meanwhile, Seminole County, in central Florida, is deploying mobile clinics in some assisted living facilities.
“We went because they were not contacted by private providers or because they were concerned about some kind of problem,” said county emergency manager Alan Harris.
“CVS and Walgreens, I think, are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of long-term care facilities in Florida,” said Harris.
The state of Florida hired health services company CDR Maguire to take over the vaccinations in some 1,900 assisted homes that CVS or Walgreens had scheduled for January 24 or later.
Los Angeles County has chosen not to join the CVS-Walgreens partnership and is asking facilities to collect and administer the vaccine. In Contra Costa County, Northern California, the nonprofit Choice in Aging teamed up with John Muir Health and Kaiser Permanente to help.
Choice in Aging targets facilities with six or fewer beds in historically underserved communities. “This is a population that is never prioritized,” said Debbie Toth, CEO of Choice in Aging.
The CDC said on Thursday that 26% of the 4.7 million doses of vaccine allocated to long-term care facilities were administered, far behind the pitiful 36% of the 30.6 million available across the country.
Graph: Implementation of vaccines in nursing homes –
West Virginia, which chose not to join the CDC Pharmacy Partnership, did extensive planning and leveraged its existing network of long-term care pharmacies to rapidly vaccinate nursing home residents in a total effort, said Dr. Michael Wasserman, former president of the California Long Term Care Medicine Association.
“Community pharmacies absolutely must be involved,” said Scott Knoer, CEO of the American Pharmacists Association. “I wish they were from the start.”
Reporting by Lisa Baertlein and Deena Beasley; additional reporting by Carl O’Donnell in New York; Edition by Peter Henderson, Bill Berkrot and Jonathan Oatis