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The Biden administration spent its first week in the office attempting to manually trace doses of the 20 million vaccine between federal distribution and administration at clinical sites, when one dose finally reached a patient’s arm.
The Trump administration’s strategy has pushed the response to the coronavirus pandemic to individual states and has omitted tracking information from the pipeline between distribution and when the shot is actually administered, administration officials said Biden at Politico.
The lack of data has now forced officials at the federal health ministry to spend hours on the phone tracing vaccine shipments, the news website reported.
“No one had the full picture,” Dr Julie Morita, a member of Biden’s transition team and executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told Politico. “The plans that were underway were made on the assumption that more information would be available and revealed once they entered the White House.
As of Saturday, 49 million doses of the vaccine were distributed by the federal government, but only 27 million administered by the states, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About two million of these doses are believed to be attributable to a 72-hour lag in reported administration, Politico reported. This still leaves millions in the pipeline between childbirth and the patient. At least 16 states have used less than half of the vaccine doses given to them, USA Today reported this week.
“Much of our work over the next week is going to make sure that we can tighten the timelines to understand where in the pipeline the vaccine actually is and when exactly it is being administered,” said Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of CDC, in the United States. Today.
Among the deployment issues identified by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is the need to improve planning, increase staff, and define workflows for administration sites. States must also improve the mismatch between supply and demand.
In one example, a hospital in Arlington, Virginia, had to cancel 10,000 appointments after the state sent doses to county health departments. The state then ordered patients to reschedule their appointments through the county health department as they became available.
“It’s very disappointing,” Jeff Gorsky, a resident whose Feb. 3 appointment was canceled, told NBC4 Washington. “We’re all stuck in the house, I rarely leave my house now, just to shop. It would have freed me.
Likewise, in Wisconsin, lawmakers asked the state’s health department about where 180,000 federally distributed vaccines that had yet to be administered were in the works, according to a report by the MacIver Institute of right.
A state health department official told lawmakers that there was not enough vaccine to meet demand, but also that 50% of doses had been reserved for a pharmaceutical partnership to vaccinate the staff and residents of long-term care homes.
But to add to the confusion, a spokesperson for the Pharmacy Society of Wisconsin later said pharmacies had not received the doses from the health department and still more had been put aside for a second. injection despite federal government directives not to do so. “A part of [the vaccine] Said Danielle Womack, spokesperson for the Pharmacy Society of Wisconsin, reported the MacIver Institute. Wisconsin doesn’t expect an immunization planning website to go live until February, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
If the Biden administration can’t get the roll-out under control, the inequalities could also exacerbate racial health disparities between populations most affected by Covid-19 and already behind on vaccination.
A first look at the 17 states and two cities that issued racial blackouts through January 25 revealed that blacks in all places are being vaccinated at lower levels than their share of the general population, in some cases significantly lower.
“We are going to see a worsening and exacerbation of the racial inequalities in health that existed before the pandemic and which worsened during the pandemic if our communities cannot access the vaccine,” said Dr Uché Blackstock, emergency physician at New York and CEO of Advancing. Health Equity, an advocacy group that tackles prejudice and inequality.
This is true even though they constitute an oversized percentage of the country’s healthcare workers, who were put on the front lines for vaccines when the campaign began in mid-December.
For example, in North Carolina, blacks make up 22% of the population and 26% of health workers, but only 11% of those vaccinated so far. Whites, a category in which the state includes both Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites, make up 68% of the population and 82% of those vaccinated.
The racial vaccination gap is partly explained by higher levels of mistrust of medical personnel on the part of racial minorities who, for centuries, have been subjected to abusive and discriminatory medical practices.
However, it is also a practical matter. In Florida, a plan to distribute Covid-19 vaccines to pharmacies in the Publix supermarket chain – which has been found to cluster in affluent communities – has left residents of Belle Glade 40 km from the most popular vaccination center. close.
Most residents of the predominantly black community “walk wherever they go,” Mayor Steve Wilson said. The state then provided a vaccination site for the community.
The CDC’s first report on early vaccine deployment is due in February.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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