I hate being the bearer of bad news, but 2021 won’t be that much different from 2020 if the country (and the world for that matter) doesn’t get its vaccination together.
While Britain is moving forward with a questionable strategy of mix different vaccines products, the new strain of COVID-19 first reported from the UK was found in Colorado and California this week, and Los Angeles continues to grapple with a devastating wave of coronavirus cases.
Despite the clearly still active spread of COVID-19, the hope that came in the form of two highly effective vaccines released in late 2020 is now tempered by a slew of rollout issues.
While more than 14 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been shipped across the US, reports the New York Times that only about 2 million people have even received a first dose. The federal government had set a target to vaccinate up to 20 million people by the end of 2020, but that target was far from being achieved, and there is no single – or clear – answer as to why.
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Officials in the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed have suggested that the holiday season could affect vaccination efforts, while Trump blamed it individual states for the slow rollout. In December, several state governors arrived the federal government shouted to ship fewer doses of vaccine to their regions than promised.
But one problem affecting the use of the vaccines may also be the reluctance of health professionals placed first in line to receive protection against COVID-19. Both LA Times and NPR report that front-line workers at hospitals in California and Chicago, respectively, have avoided receiving vaccine doses.
In Riverside County, California, nearly 50% of eligible health professionals have refused the vaccine. While some of the refusals come from pregnant front-line workers wary of taking the vaccine (the Center for Disease Control says there is limited data on the safety of vaccines administered to pregnant or breastfeeding women), others avoid receiving doses for fear and mistrust of the authorities.
“It’s not shocking given what the federal government has been doing for the past 10 months,” Sal Rosselli, the president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told the LA Times.
In a December survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, three in ten health professionals said they “probably or definitely” would not be vaccinated.
Then there are the incidents where health professionals deliberately sabotage vaccines or mess up the distribution of doses to those who are actively seeking them.
In Tennessee, WRCB 3 News items that on Friday, officials from the Hamilton County Health Department dismissed dozens of people who had spent hours in their cars waiting for their turn on a vaccination shot, citing a limited supply. Later that day, health department officials were found to be dividing doses among “ close contacts, ” that is, people who were friends and relatives of those administering the vaccine.
And police arrested a pharmacist who worked at Advocate Aurora Health Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on New Year’s Eve, on charges that he had taken 570 doses of the Moderna vaccine from refrigerated storage and left them overnight, deliberately leaving them behind. were ‘useless’.
According to a statement Grafton police, who have arrested the employee this week but are not yet to name him, administered 57 doses of the tainted vaccine to patients. Although hospital officials said there were no health problems associated with receiving the destroyed vaccines, the employee wrote a statement admitting to deliberately spoiling the doses by taking them out of the refrigerator. Police say he also knew that people who received the destroyed doses would think they were protected from the virus when they were not.
The suspect has yet to be formally charged, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Steven Brandenburg, 46, a licensed pharmacist, who is in prison on the preliminary charges set out by Grafton police in their statement about the arrest.
President-elect Biden has a major battle ahead as he takes over the White House and the ongoing fight against the coronavirus pandemic – the most important of which is getting more of the public on board with a collective response to protect ourselves from the disease.