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By Sharon Bernstein
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) – Jerry Shapiro, a 78-year-old pharmacist from Los Angeles, topped the list of Californians now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, but more than a month after the state began the vaccinations, he has not yet received any.
Shapiro said he spent hours calling multiple health agencies and performing unsuccessful computer searches, an experience familiar to many in the United States, as President Joe Biden’s days-old administration fell apart. rushed to speed up the slow and chaotic vaccine rollout in the country. .
“Why not make it easy?” asked Shapiro, who is also worried about his wife due to medical conditions that would make her particularly vulnerable to the virus. “Have it in your neighborhood. Make an appointment, take your picture and finish.”
The United States is the country hardest hit by COVID-19, with 24.51 million cases and 409,987 deaths as of early Friday morning. More than 4,000 Americans died of the disease Thursday for the second day in a row.
Even so, the vaccine rollout, which the administration of former President Donald Trump let states do without a federal plan and sufficient funding, has turned out to be choppy.
From California, where distribution has varied from county to county, to New York, where the nation’s largest city is short of supplies, states and healthcare providers have struggled to acquire, store and distribute vaccines.
“We are burning our supply,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter on Friday. “We need more doses NOW so that we can protect the most vulnerable residents of our city. We need more doses to be able to fight back.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said only 67% of healthcare workers in New York City had received a dose of the vaccine and he warned that if the federal government couldn’t find a way to quickly ramp up production, everyone would suffer.
“Hospital workers are the ones who, if they get sick, the capacity of the hospital will collapse,” Cuomo said at a press conference. “If the hospital’s capacity collapses, we have to shut down the economy.”
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said the state’s immunization program has managed to get 70% of its vaccine supply to people’s arms, but a federal program within the state to helping nursing home residents had distributed only 10% of its supply.
The nation’s top infectious disease specialist, Dr Anthony Fauci, said on Friday that the federal government had given too much responsibility for distributing the vaccine to state governments.
“States were doing things that were clearly not in the right direction – and that’s unfortunate,” Fauci told CNN.
Instead, he said, the administration should work with states to help them plan their deployments and make sure vaccines get into people’s arms.
DISTRIBUTION CHALLENGES
Less than half of the nearly 38 million doses of vaccine shipped to date by the federal government have actually been in the arms of Americans, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday.
Some states are lagging behind with only a third or 40% of their vaccine allocations administered on Thursday, marking the first anniversary of the first locally documented case of COVID-19 transmitted in the United States.
A key problem is organizing the distribution of vaccines in small clinics and pharmacies – rather than in large medical centers and retail drug chains.
In California, only a handful of independent pharmacies have been able to acquire vaccines for their customers – usually only in rural areas where large chain stores do not have a presence, said Sonya Frausto, pharmacist in the state capital of Sacramento. .
Shapiro, who owns an independent pharmacy in downtown Los Angeles, said customers call daily to get vaccines, but he must tell them he doesn’t have one.
He and his wife finally made an appointment to receive a vaccine on Saturday, after repeated phone calls and hours of waiting that led them to health giant Kaiser Permanente. The Shapiros are not members of Kaiser, but the nonprofit does offer them photos nonetheless, Jerry Shapiro said.
In Sacramento, 65-year-old restaurateur Jami Goldstene would feel much safer in her public work if she could get the shot. She is technically eligible due to her age, but has yet to receive an appointment – or even find a way to make one – despite spending hours on the phone and on the internet.
“It’s very frustrating,” she says. “I want to end this. 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)
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