Some people in Philadelphia receive coronavirus vaccines, even though they may not be eligible – and the city has not found a way to stop it.
Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said on Friday that people have been sending vaccination appointment links to others for weeks, but the company in charge of managing the appointment software has not yet provided a solution to the problem. As a result, some people who use the link to name someone else receive photos, even though they shouldn’t be able to.
Despite the problem, the city has not taken any other screening measures to ensure the right people are vaccinated, Farley said.
“They may be medically eligible, but they were not necessarily the guests,” the commissioner said. “So if they’re there, we’ll vaccinate them and we’ll continue to vaccinate them.”
The reason for this is that one of the city’s goals is to inoculate people as quickly as possible, so that the return of some – even if they shouldn’t have had a date – would be counterintuitive, Farley said.
However, he begged people not to jump the line for the shooting. He said the city and the company that manages the vaccine scheduling software are working on a sort of “solution early next week, but it hasn’t been finalized yet.”
Next week, Philadelphia expects to receive approximately 19,800 doses of Pfizer vaccine and 15,600 doses of Moderna vaccine, Farley said, adding that the federal government is also allocating 5,000 doses of Moderna to local pharmacies.
As of Sunday, Feb. 28, about 234,000 people had received the first vaccine and 110,000 had received the second, Farley said. Of those vaccinated, about 23% are black, 4.5% are Hispanic and 6.4% are Asian.
Philadelphia also expects about 13,100 doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Because the vaccine is only a single dose, the city recommends that health care providers prioritize shooting for hard-to-reach people, such as transients and those at home, Farley said.