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ANGELS
ANGELS A former Arkansas health official is sounding the alarm over the timing of coronavirus vaccines given to residents of long-term care facilities under a U.S. plan that puts major CVS and Walgreens pharmacy chains in high demand.
Less than 10% of the doses allocated to those seniors in Arkansas were administered, according to the state Department of Health. The two pharmacies work with about 40% of state facilities. Some of them have been told they are scheduled for February or March, said Dr. Joe Thompson, a former Arkansas surgeon and executive director of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.
“This is not acceptable,” Thompson said. “We see a failure in implementation by CVS and Walgreens.”
Federal health officials have called in recent days to extend vaccine eligibility to tens of millions of Americans to speed up the launch of the national inoculation program. Meanwhile, the elderly at some long-term care facilities – which account for about 1% of the US population but 40% of COVID-19 deaths and should have been in the front line – are still waiting.
State and local officials and long-term caregivers in states, including Florida, California, Arizona, Indiana and Pennsylvania, told Reuters that they had turned to alternative providers of vaccinations for residents or their staff as pharmacy chains photos weeks out.
About 75,000 long-term care facilities have signed up to receive vaccines from CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. under the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Pharmacy Partnership Program.
“I think it’s facing serious bandwidth issues when it comes to scheduling,” said David Grabowski, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a medical policy expert. “I find it very worrying that we didn’t do this sooner. This is really a matter of life and death.”
Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson said in a statement Thursday that the two pharmacy chains have assured him that all long-term care residents assigned to them will be vaccinated by the end of this month.
Many states have given priority to housing with patients in need of medical care, which has contributed to delays in other long-term care facilities.
CVS has stated that it intends to complete all photographs at the assigned facilities within nine to 12 weeks of the first dose. This means that states such as California, Florida, Arizona, Alabama, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, which were among the last to activate the second phase of vaccinations at the facility, cannot be completed until April.
“State decisions about which facilities are activated when they have a significant impact on the calendar,” said CVS spokesman TJ Crawford, noting that the company has managed 1 million photos and is on track with its federal agreement. .
Other obstacles included confirmation of vaccine availability, winter holidays, vaccine hesitation and fresh outbreaks of COVID-19, the companies said.
This resulted in “a slightly slower start than we expected. Now that we’ve passed the first year, you see a rapid and rapid acceleration,” said Rick Gates, senior vice president of Walgreens Pharmacy and Nursing. The company has taken over 500,000 photos and expects to be taken by March.
“OVERVIEWED BY VOLUME SHEER”
Meanwhile, Seminole County in central Florida runs mobile clinics in some assisted living facilities.
“We went because they were either not contacted by private providers or they were worried about a certain type of problem,” said county emergency manager Alan Harris.
CVS and Walgreens, I think, are overwhelmed by Florida’s large volume of long-term care facilities, Harris said.
The state of Florida has hired health services firm CDR Maguire to take over vaccinations at about 1,900 assisted living facilities that CVS or Walgreens had scheduled on or after Jan. 24.
Los Angeles County has dropped the CVS-Walgreens partnership and is demanding facilities that can take over and administer the vaccine themselves. In Northern California’s Contra Costa County, the aging nonprofit chose John Muir Health and Kaiser Permanente to help.
The aging choice targets facilities with six or fewer beds in historically serviced communities. “This is a population that is never prioritized,” said Debbie Toth, CEO of Choice in Aging.
The CDC on Thursday said 26% of the 4.7 million doses of vaccine allocated to long-term care sites were administered, leaving even the sad 36% of the 30.6 million available nationwide.
Graph: vaccine launch in nursing homes – here
West Virginia, which has given up the CDC Pharmacy Partnership, has done extensive planning and leveraged its existing network of long-term care pharmacies to quickly vaccinate nursing home residents in a hands-on effort, said Dr. Michael Wasserman of the California Association of Long-Term Care Medicine.
“Community pharmacies should be absolutely involved,” said Scott Knoer, CEO of the American Pharmacists Association. “I wish it had been from the beginning.”
(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein and Deena Beasley; Additional reporting by Carl O’Donnell in New York; Editing by Peter Henderson, Bill Berkrot and Jonathan Oatis)