As we discussed yesterday, Florida has run into huge difficulties trying to get adequate doses of vaccine for all the elderly who apply for vaccination. Far to the north, in New York State, pretty much the opposite problem arises. Large numbers of vaccine vials from both Pfizer and Moderna have arrived in the Empire State. The problem is that they are not injected into hopeful patients at an acceptable rate. By the end of the year, 630,000 doses had been received, but barely 200,000 had been administered. This has a lot of people, particularly health workers and nursing home residents, wondering what’s the hold up and who’s in charge of this mess. (NY Post)
New York has administered less than a third of the doses of coronavirus vaccines it has available to date – even as Mayor de Blasio boldly claimed Thursday that he would have vaccinated one million city residents within a month.
About 630,000 vaccine doses have been sent to the Empire State, but only 203,000 doses had actually reached the arms of New Yorkers as of Wednesday, state data shows …
In New York City, about 88,000 people received a first dose in the past three weeks, when the vaccine was administered to health professionals and nursing home residents.
“We’re way, way behind where we need to be,” said Councilman Mark Levine, chairman of the New York City Health Committee.
As the editors of the New York Post point out, while this highlights the ineptitude of the Cuomo and de Blasio administrations, it is unfortunately not just a local problem. Pfizer and Moderna had shipped 12.4 million doses nationwide by the end of the year, but only 3.1 million had been administered.
Obviously, this is not happening due to a lack of demand, as we saw in Florida this week. While there has been significant resistance among nurses and other medical personnel on the front line to getting the vaccine (which is worrying enough in itself), there are many seniors who seem to be fighting to get their hands dirty. A recent study found that patients with severe breathing problems and other underlying conditions were similarly likely to risk their injections rather than risk a potentially fatal dose of COVID.
What we’re seeing here is almost certainly a combination of a lack of planning and red tape. A problem in New York is that the state has ordered pharmacies, hospitals and clinics to stop a second injection from anyone who gets their first dose. That means they should keep half of the vials they receive for up to a month to ensure that a second dose is available to the patient after the required waiting time.
But does that make sense? At least at the national level, the government has worked with Moderna and Pfizer to make accurate predictions of how many bottles they can produce per day and where they all go. Barring a major outage in the production lines, every state needs to know how many bottles they expect to receive per week. So why not continue to give all the initial doses to someone on the priority list who asks for it and then, three or four weeks later, start with the number needed for a second dose for all patients who have already had their first injection?
The logistics of such a plan really boil down to nothing more than simple addition and subtraction, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to manage. In addition, we would have the added benefit that outlets like CVS would not have to store huge volumes of vials of the highly vulnerable vaccine for up to a month at a time. That should minimize the losses if a refrigeration unit fails or a psychopath deliberately spoils an entire batch of it.
I don’t want to keep hitting a dead horse here, but how did this not all work out long ago? We knew months in advance that multiple pharmaceutical companies were nearing the finish line developing vaccines and starting their trials. Even if each of them had failed in testing, it should still have been common sense to develop a fully fleshed out distribution plan, assuming there would one day be a viable, approved vaccine, right? The staggering incompetence of the bureaucracy seems to be fully expressed here, and it is almost inevitable that some of our ordinary citizens will pay for those mistakes with their lives.