Florida issues new residency rules for Covid-19 vaccines to reduce ‘vaccine tourism’

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State Surgeon General Dr Scott Rivkees signed a public health advisory prioritizing Florida residents for vaccines, days after Gov. Ron DeSantis publicly said vaccines should be restricted to residents. part-time or full-time from Sunshine State.

“We only do photos for Florida residents,” DeSantis said Tuesday in Cape Coral. “You have to live here full time or at least part time.”

At another Rockledge press conference on Tuesday, DeSantis differentiated between “snowbirds,” who live in Florida during the winter months, and those who stop just to try and get the shot.

“Now we have part-time residents who are here all winter,” he says. “They go to the doctors here or whatever, that’s good. What we don’t want are tourists, foreigners. We want to put seniors first, but obviously we want to put the people who live here first. ”

Change came after reports reported that some non-Floridians, including people with second homes in Florida and several wealthy Argentines, had traveled to Florida to be vaccinated.
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As of Jan. 19, Florida had vaccinated more than 39,000 people residing out of state, including more than 1,000 who had received the two recommended doses, according to data from the Florida Department of Health. That’s about 3.5% of the 1.12 million people who have been vaccinated in Florida. State data does not distinguish between tourists and part-time residents.
The revelations have sparked frustration among Floridians unable to get vaccinated, forced to wait hours in line or stranded by confusing or restless websites.

But the problem is not specific to Florida. Vaccine tourism is the result of a few key factors: vaccine scarcity relative to demand; the disorganized begin to administer the injections; and the lack of consistent federal guidelines, which has created different vaccine availability between states and even between counties.

Dr Peter Hotez, vaccine expert and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said vaccine tourism had highlighted the failures of the slow federal vaccine rollout.

“If we’re still in this situation in a month’s time, we’re going to have a lot of problems,” he said.

Why people travel to get vaccinated

Florida has made it possible for anyone 65 and over to get vaccinated, regardless of where they live, making it one of the first states to open up to this age group.

In contrast, many other states in the United States have residency requirements and require people to bring ID, mail, or rent statements to prove it. A number of states have also moved closer to the Phase 1b guidelines recommended by the CDC Vaccine Committee, according to which vaccines should be intended for adults 75 years of age and older and essential frontline workers.
Understandably, people desperate for the vaccine, able to travel, and lucky enough to get vaccine appointments on tough websites or hotlines, have gone a long way to get them.
Mark and Connie Wallace, who live in Shelby County, Alabama, told CNN affiliate WBMA that they drove nearly two hours to Georgia to get the shot at a Publix pharmacy.
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“They knew we were from out of state and they said it was good,” said Connie Wallace, “so we didn’t feel like we were pushing someone else, this that we didn’t want to do. “

Connie is 68 years old and has underlying health issues related to her heart, WBMA reported. The couple managed to secure an appointment for a vaccine online, so they ventured out to Carrollton, Georgia to get the shot.

“I would have been gone eight hours if I had,” Mark Wallace told the WBMA.

Similar interstate vaccinations have been observed in major metropolitan areas that cross borders.

New York City has vaccinated healthcare workers or other essential workers like teachers or firefighters who work in the city but live outside the five boroughs. According to data from New York, about 73% of people vaccinated in New York live in the city, 15% live in another part of New York state, and the rest live in New Jersey, Connecticut, or another. State or have not provided their residence.

Because the federal government allocates the vaccine based on population, this has created an uneven deployment.

Two weeks ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio sent a letter to then-Vice President Mike Pence asking him to allocate more doses to “New York and other suburban jurisdictions that vaccinate more than their residents ”.

Vaccine tourism not a big deal, experts say

People line up to get the Covid-19 vaccine on January 13 at a mass vaccination site in a parking lot at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California.

Dr William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, said he recognizes that a New Yorker can be frustrated when a New Jersey commuter cross borders to get vaccinated.

But as long as the vaccine is used rather than remaining intact, this is not a problem from a public health perspective.

“Rather than ‘this is my vaccine, not yours,’ (receiving) the vaccine in arms is what we want,” he said. “I hope we have enough vaccines quickly so that we don’t have to dwell on these somewhat trivial matters.”

The end goal is to vaccinate enough Americans to achieve herd immunity, typically estimated at around 70 to 80 percent of the population. Schaffner indicated that the high demand for the coronavirus vaccine is essentially a good problem to have at this point.

“There are people who are anxious to get the vaccine – boy, that’s a good thing,” he said. “So let’s not try to lose their ingenuity and their imagination.

Hotez said he doesn’t see vaccine tourism as a moral issue, but stressed that traveling during the pandemic has its own risks. And he noted that all states are equally struggling to administer enough vaccines due to federal issues.

“Vaccinated tourists are most likely ready to be disappointed,” he said.

CNN’s Maria Cartaya contributed to this report.

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