MADISON, Wisconsin – On Tuesday morning, the UW Health vaccine panel showed that the health organization had only 93 first doses available and 22,353 people scheduled to get the vaccine.
“It is really evident that there is simply not enough vaccine and there is really a huge incompatibility,” said Dr. Matt Anderson, Senior Medical Director of Primary Care at UW Health.
UW Health ended up receiving a shipment of 2,300 first doses that morning, but some appointments later this week will still need to be rescheduled due to a lack of supplies.
“It is certainly not something we would like to do. We have certainly defended and tried to get more offers, but now this is the situation we are in, ”said Anderson.
He said UW Health has been talking to the state about how many older patients they have in the hope that DHS will give them more vaccine. Anderson said with 52,000 patients aged 65 and over, UW Health cares for about 6% of the state’s population in this age group.
But DHS does not consider how many patients eligible for a vaccine a hospital system has when deciding where to allocate doses from the state. Instead, it looks at geographic location and capacity.
At a press conference on Tuesday, DHS Deputy Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk explained that this is why many pharmacies in Dane County have not received any vaccines this week.
“We had 505 vaccinators requesting almost 290,000 vaccines. And then we had to make a lot of difficult decisions. And one of the difficult decisions we make is that anyone whose allocation would be less than 50 has not received the vaccine, ”said Willems Van Dijk. “We have a very high number of vaccinators in Dane County, which means that not everyone is going to get the vaccine because we need to keep vaccine for other parts of the state.”
Although DHS also looks at how many doses vaccinators can administer in a week, Dr. Anderson said that UW Health can give more than double the amount of vaccines being allocated.
“We could give, in a few weeks here, more than 7,000 first doses and then continue to give our second doses. And now the supply is nowhere near touching our ability to use vaccines in greater quantities, ”said Anderson.
At that rate, if UW Health continues to receive about 2,000 doses of vaccine a week, he said it could be the end of April before all patients 65 and older had a chance to get vaccinated.
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