“There were some [EMS] departments that everyone said, ‘We’re going to get him,’ ”said Dr. Mouhanad Hammami, chief health strategist at Wayne County’s Department of Health, Veterans and Community Welfare, Bridge.
In fact, some EMS units have sent more than a dozen workers on a vaccine truck. “But then you have, perhaps in one company, 25 EMS workers and only two said, ‘We want the vaccine.’ “
Health professionals, he said, have the “privilege to be among the first” to receive the vaccine and, most likely, “I would be more informed about … a vaccine trial and have a little more confidence ”.
A Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said “there were no significant obstacles” to the distribution of the vaccine, which the state hopes to administer to 5.6 million people, or 70% of the state’s population over 16 years.
“This is the largest vaccination effort ever made in the country, and each state is struggling with the distribution of the vaccine going more slowly than necessary to end this pandemic as soon as possible,” said Lynn Sutfin of MDHHS by email. . “The launch of mass vaccinations during the December holiday season created delays, with some individuals intentionally postponing vaccines to themselves until after the holidays and the clinics not functioning due to the holidays.”
Sutfin did not directly address why Michigan had one of the lowest COVID vaccination rates in the country.
She said the state did not yet have data on vaccinations among staff in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Several other states, including Ohio, reported high rates of vaccine refusal among employees.
Sutfin said the state is looking to improve vaccination rates by encouraging hospitals and health departments to administer 90 percent of doses within seven days of receipt and clarifying who can receive the vaccine, as well as telling hospitals that they can vaccinate health workers. who cannot be their own employees.
“We will continue to evaluate our overall strategy to increase the number of vaccinations in Michigan,” she said.
Others note some problems in the logistics of vaccine distribution.
Ruthanne Sudderth, spokesperson for the Michigan Health & Hospital Association, a hospital industry group, said that hospitals inform the state of how many doses they need in the following week, with the state passing on that message to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But she said that when the federal government notifies hospitals of delivery of new doses, it usually offers a date range instead of a firm delivery time. This makes it challenging for hospitals to define employee schedules and locations for employee vaccination campaigns, and some have been canceled because of these problems.
“So far, the main barrier to faster vaccination has been the lack of consistent and timely information on the amount of vaccines that Michigan hospitals will receive from the federal government,” she said in an email to Bridge. “With little waiting time in quantity and on the day of arrival, it is very difficult to plan vaccine clinics for employees and to know which other community health professionals hospitals should try to vaccinate”.
Sudderth said preliminary reports she saw in hospitals show that 75% to 80% of eligible health professionals agree to receive the vaccine.
At noon on Monday, federal data showed that Michigan hospitals and health departments helped the state administer 26% of the 378,925 doses sent to the state, compared to 32% of 15.4 million doses at the national level. national. (Data released by the state on Monday night showed that 34 percent of doses had already been administered in Michigan, but the updated figures for other states were not available immediately.)
At Hillsdale Hospital in southern Michigan, the team managed to administer as many doses as it received, said Rachel Lott, director of marketing and development.
Lott acknowledged that some workers in the first priority phase, frontline health professionals refused to be vaccinated, opening up availability to others in the second tier, including teachers and police. She also said that some workers who initially refused the injections agreed to be vaccinated.
In Ingham County, authorities have shortened the list of health professionals so that available vaccines are used as quickly as possible, said Vail, the health official. The health office will call organizations with skilled workers – an EMS group, for example – and ask how many vaccines will be needed.
A group of, say, 40 workers, may have 25 people who will want the vaccine, she said.
As soon as they have reserved places and scheduled those 25 people to their drive-thru vaccination clinic, employees move to another group of health professionals and down through the subgroup of health professionals considered eligible as Phase 1a, or top priority recipients under state vaccine distribution plan. Currently, Ingham is the only county on the state’s vaccination panel where the number of doses administered is listed as “high”.
Any health worker or long-term resident or staff, as defined in Phase 1a, is eligible for a vaccine in Ingham County, she said. In the coming days, the county will open available Phase 1b vaccines, which are other “essential frontline workers and individuals 75 years of age or older,” she said.
“The last thing we want is any vaccine installed here,” she said.
Ingham and others say they expect those who are reluctant to get the vaccine to change their minds as co-workers and friends receive it.
Mistrust of an impending COVID-19 vaccine was widespread in the United States in the early months of the pandemic, as governments around the world rushed to develop an effective vaccine. The rapid pace of vaccine testing has preoccupied some, with skepticism spurred by unfounded conspiracy theories. More recently, public acceptance of vaccines has improved as positive results about vaccine safety and efficacy have been released and two have been approved for use in the United States.
The first vaccine was approved for emergency use in the country less than a month ago. There has been little time – squeezed between testing and contact tracking and patient care – to educate the public.
“There is certainly room for education,” said Nick Derusha, president of the Michigan Public Health Association, which represents the state’s 45 local health departments.