SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) – Jerry Shapiro, a 78-year-old Los Angeles pharmacist, tops the list of Californians now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, but more than a month after the state began vaccinations, he hasn’t received one yet.
Shapiro said he spent hours calling multiple health authorities and conducting fruitless computer searches, an experience familiar to many in the United States as President Joe Biden’s age-old administration scrambles to kickstart the country’s slow, chaotic rollout of vaccines. bring. .
“Why don’t you make it easy?” Shapiro asked, also concerned about his wife due to medical conditions that would make her particularly vulnerable to the virus. ‘Have it near you. Make an appointment, take a chance and go. “
The United States is the country most affected by COVID-19, with 24.51 million cases and 409,987 dead early Friday morning. More than 4,000 Americans died of the disease for the second day in a row on Thursday.
Still, the vaccine rollout, which former President Donald Trump’s administration has left for states to implement without a federal blueprint or adequate funding, has proven choppy.
From California, where distribution varies from county to county, to New York, where the country’s largest city is nearly empty, states and health care providers are struggling to obtain, stock, and distribute vaccines.
“We’re burning through our stock,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote on Twitter on Friday. “We IMMEDIATELY need more doses to protect our city’s most vulnerable residents. We need more doses so we can fight back. “
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said only 67% of health workers in New York have been given a vaccine dose, and he warned that if the federal government didn’t find a way to ramp up production quickly, everyone would suffer.
“The hospital workers are the people who, if they get sick, will collapse hospital capacity,” Cuomo said at a news conference. “If hospital capacity collapses, we have to close the economy.”
In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy said the state’s vaccination program had managed to get 70% of the vaccine supply into the people’s arms, but a federal program within the state to help nursing home residents accounted for only 10% of stock.
The country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Friday that the federal government has placed too much responsibility for distributing the vaccine on state governments.
“States were doing things that were clearly not in the right direction – and that’s a shame,” Fauci said on CNN.
Instead, he said, the government should work with states to help them plan their rollout and ensure vaccines get into people’s arms.
DISTRIBUTION CHALLENGES
Less than half of the nearly 38 million vaccine doses sent by the federal government to date have actually ended up in the arms of Americans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday.
Some individual states were left with only a third or 40% of their vaccine allocations as of Thursday, marking the one-year anniversary of the first locally transmitted COVID-19 case documented in the United States.
A major problem is organizing the distribution of vaccines to smaller clinics and pharmacies – instead of just to large medical centers and pharmaceutical retail chains.
In California, only a handful of independent pharmacies have been able to purchase vaccines for their customers – usually only in rural areas where the major retail chains don’t have a presence, said Sonya Frausto, a pharmacist in the state capital of Sacramento.
Shapiro, who runs an independent pharmacy in downtown Los Angeles, said customers call daily to look for vaccines, but he has to tell them he doesn’t have stock.
He and his wife finally made arrangements to get a vaccine on Saturday, after repeated calls and hours of waiting led them to the health care giant Kaiser Permanente. The Shapiros aren’t Kaiser members, but the nonprofit offers them shots anyway, Jerry Shapiro said.
In Sacramento, 65-year-old restaurateur Jami Goldstene would feel a lot safer in her public job if she could get a vaccine. She’s technically eligible for her age, but has yet to get an appointment – or even find a way to get one – despite hours on the phone and the Internet.
“It’s very frustrating,” she said. ‘I want to be done with it. I want to feel safe again. “
Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani in New York, Lisa Lambert in Washington, Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas, and Anurag Maan in Bengaluru; Editing by Frank McGurty and Matthew Lewis