As we discussed yesterday, Florida has faced massive problems in trying to get enough doses of vaccine for all older people who sign up to be inoculated. Far to the north, in New York State, there is almost the opposite. A large number of vaccine bottles from Pfizer and Moderna have arrived in the Empire State. The problem is that they are not injected into hopeful patients, close to an acceptable rate. At the end of the year, 630,000 doses were received, but only 200,000 were administered. This has a lot of people, especially health workers and nursing home residents, who are wondering what the deal is and who is actually responsible for this mess. (NY Post)
New York has administered less than a third of the coronavirus vaccine doses it has available so far – even though Mayor de Blasio boldly claimed Thursday that it will have a million city residents inoculated in a month.
About 630,000 doses of vaccine have been sent to Empire State, but only 203,000 doses have taken effect in the arms of New Yorkers since Wednesday, state data show …
In New York, about 88,000 people have received a first dose in the past three weeks as the vaccine began to be given to health care workers and nursing home residents.
“We’re far behind where we need to be,” said Councilor Mark Levine, chair of the New York City Health Committee.
As the New York Post’s editorial board points out, although this highlights the ineptitude of the Cuomo and Blasio administrations, unfortunately it is not just a local issue. Pfizer and Moderna had delivered 12.4 million doses nationwide by the end of the year, but only 3.1 million had been administered.
Clearly, this is not due to a lack of demand, as we saw in Florida this week. While there have been significant pockets of resistance to vaccine administration among nurses and other front-line nurses (which is quite worrying in itself), there are many older citizens who seem to be struggling to make ends meet. roll up your sleeves. A recent survey showed that patients with severe respiratory problems and other underlying conditions were similarly inclined to take their chances with the injections, rather than risk a potentially fatal dose of COVID.
What we see here is almost certainly a combination of lack of planning and administration. One problem in New York is that the state has directed pharmacies, hospitals and clinics to hold a second blow for all those receiving the first dose. This means that they need to store half of the vials they receive for up to a month to ensure that the second dose is available to the patient after the required waiting period.
But does it make sense? At least nationally, the government has worked with Moderna and Pfizer to make accurate forecasts of how many bottles they can produce per day and to which they all go. Except for major production line failures, every state should know how many bottles it expects to receive per week. So why not continue to give all the initial doses to anyone on the priority list who asks and then, starting three or four weeks later, remember the number needed for the second dose for all patients who have already received the first shot?
The logistics of such a plan are nothing more than the basic addition and subtraction, so it should not be so difficult to manage. In addition, we would gain the added benefit of outlets such as CVS, which do not have to store a large number of bottles of very fragile vaccine for up to a month. This should minimize losses if a refrigeration unit fails or if a psychopath intentionally damages an entire batch of them.
I don’t want to keep beating a dead horse here, but how come everything wasn’t solved long before? I knew a few months ago that several pharmaceutical companies were approaching the finish line in developing vaccines and starting their tests. Even if each of them failed during the test, it should still have made sense to develop a complete distribution plan, assuming there was a viable vaccine, approved at some point, right? The astonishing incompetence of the bureaucracy seems to be fully displayed here, and it is almost inevitable that some of our citizens will pay for those scams with their lives.