SCHWENKSVILLE, Pa. (Reuters) – By Hannah Beier and Maria Caspani
Behind the Skippack Pharmacy counter in Schwenksville, near Philadelphia, owner Mayank Amin has been working late into the night since his independent pharmacy received state approval for COVID-19 vaccines in late January.
There are thousands of sorted emails and phone calls to the field, supplies to organize, appointments to schedule.
Amen, known as Dr. Mak, set up a Super Bowl vaccination clinic on Sunday for local firefighters that drew more than 1,000 people who held their shooting appointments despite the snow that day.
“It was like a party there,” Amin, 36, said in an interview with Reuters in late February. “It was something you could never have imagined in your life, to see four strangers carrying someone in a wheelchair to take them through the mud and into the building.”
Due to the deep ties with their communities and the trust they have managed to establish over the years, some local pharmacists are essential to reach people who may be reluctant to vaccinate or may not know about vaccination efforts, said Jennifer Kates, global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“These local pharmacies are a very important voice of trust,” Kates said.
The launch of the vaccines, which the administration of former President Donald Trump left to the states to carry out without a federal plan or sufficient funding, proved to be agitated. Under President Joe Biden, supply has increased, but some distribution and access barriers persist.
Montgomery County, where Schwenksville is located, has one of the highest vaccination rates per capita in the state, according to the state health department’s website. Pennsylvania occupies 28 of 50 states, with 18 percent of residents receiving at least one stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (tmsnrt.rs/2WTOZDR)
SURPRISE SHOT
On a gray Saturday morning in late February, Amin slipped into a Superman suit, the remnant of the Halloweens past he now sometimes wears for vaccinations, and drove through the frozen suburbs to deliver two COVID-19 vaccines to patients at home. .
“What a surprise!” Gail Bertsch, 74, said after Amin and several unexpected volunteers knocked on the door. She and her husband James, who suffers from dementia, received both injections.
“I can’t believe we can do that,” she said.
Amin also vaccinated people at pharmacy appointments, including a special clinic for pregnant women and another for children with underlying health conditions.
Among them was the pharmacist’s nephew, who suffers from neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes the formation of tumors in the brain, nerves and other parts of the body.
About 3,000 people received the first photos from both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech through Skippack Pharmacy in early February, Amin said. Among the 1,000 residents who received the second dose over the weekend were Chester and Martha Pish, aged 97 and 98, respectively, who were married for 78 years.
The effort has been very consuming for Amen and fraught with obstacles, including the organization of vaccine stocks – which sometimes arrive a few hours earlier, a side effect of supply chain hiccups that are among the issues that have affected the launch.
The young pharmacist reunites with his pregnant wife only on weekends as a health precaution and spends the week at his parents’ home in Lansdale. The couple will have their first child in May.
“I want to be there when my baby is born and I want to make sure all my people are vaccinated by then,” he told Reuters. “If I could, this would be my dream.”
WE COME TOGETHER
The pandemic weight and now the effort to get fire in people’s arms have united the community in Montgomery County behind the young pharmacist.
On the last day of Friday, five volunteers converged on the back of the store. They filled out spreadsheets with patient contact information and checked the inventory of vaccination materials.
Amin has only one full-time employee, Jacquelyn Ziegler, and two pharmacy interns, Erica Mabry and Isabelle Lawler. But it can rely on dozens of volunteers, including family members, to answer the phone and help less tech-savvy patients navigate the online system to book an appointment with the COVID-19 vaccine.
“It’s amazing how everyone has some sort of filtering in this space,” said event planner Courtney Marengo, one of Amin’s volunteers.
Amin said he did not intend to own a pharmacy. But it moved to fill a gap left when Skippack, a 50-year-old local institution, was bought by national giant CVS in 2018. The chain acquired the assets of Skippack Pharmacy, but left it closed. Amin bought the pharmacy from CVS before the pandemic, hoping to keep the resource in the community.
“I feel like sometimes things fall on your lap at certain times in your life,” he said. “You may not have planned for it to happen, but it’s happening for the right reason.”
Reporting by Maria Caspani and Hannah Beier in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania; written by Maria Caspani; edited by Donna Bryson and Lisa Shumaker