How to get more people vaccinated against the coronavirus faster

Yet while a lot of money and effort has gone into developing vaccines and distributing them to states, less appears to have been invested in how to get them administered, public health experts have said.

“There seems to have been the idea in Washington that, damn it, you have all these public health professionals. All you have to do is send the vaccine,” said William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases. at Vanderbilt University.

“I have flashbacks to what happened with the tests,” said Dr. Leana Wen, visiting professor of health policy and management at the Milken School of Public Health at George Washington University and analyst. CNN Medical.

“It’s the same thing, that initially there were promises made which were based on optimistic projections. Everyone assumed there was a national strategy when in the end there was no there wasn’t. ”

State and local health departments are already overburdened and “have not had the resources to plan and deploy the most ambitious immunization program ever undertaken by our country,” Wen said.

These departments “handled all the other aspects of pandemic operations like testing, contact tracing, public education, data tracking, and now you add to that responsibility this huge responsibility, and they say so they’ve needed extra support for months. “

Added to this is the fact that “the public health infrastructure in the United States has been shrinking for about 15 to 20 years,” Schaffner said.

How to speed up vaccinations

There are several things the federal government can do to speed up the vaccination process, Wen said, including instilling a sense of urgency and “(making) it clear that this is a wartime mobilization. It requires a national effort 24/7, with no excuse. “

Schaffner agreed.

“You can vaccinate on Saturday, you can vaccinate on Sunday, you can start at 6 am,” Schaffner said. “You can go until 8 or 9 at night. So the more you can vaccinate, the better.”

Second, Wen said, the government could set goals, figure out what national and local authorities need to meet the goals, and help them get what they need.

And the government could help streamline the process, staff vaccination centers and set up mass vaccination sites.

“Anything that can be done by the federal government, they should be doing, especially staffing,” Mr. Wen said. “Why should 50 states try to figure out how they should all recruit vaccinators?”

Mass immunization clinics – in parking lots, for example – would be one way to eventually speed up everyone’s immunization, said LJ Tan, director of strategy for the Action Coalition for Immunization, who works to increase vaccination rates.

With the flu, “we know that if you do a really good mass vaccination clinic, you can easily eliminate 20,000 vaccines a day,” Tan said. The coronavirus vaccine rate would not be as high because of the wait time needed after the vaccine is administered to ensure there is no allergic reaction, he said.

Reluctance of health workers

But the real key to solving the problem, Schaffner said, is communication.

“ There has been an underestimation of the amount of communication work it will take to get people who are reluctant to join the fold and get them vaccinated, ” Schaffner said. Even my good friends and dear friends at the CDC deeply underestimated the degree. reluctance to vaccinate among people working in the health sector. “

Sensing this would be a problem, Vanderbilt University Medical Center launched an educational program four to six weeks before vaccine delivery, Schaffner said, including videos, social media, and question-and-answer sessions.

“We could see the proverbial needle moving in the direction of acceptance,” Schaffner said.

In Kentucky, “more than 30% of eligible people refuse to receive the vaccine when offered” in some cases, the state health commissioner said Thursday.

In nursing homes, caregivers – not residents – are reported to be reluctant to get vaccinated, Tan said.

“We have to find ways to come in and help them and help educate the caregivers,” Tan said. “It is a safe and effective vaccine.”

The slow rollout is partly related to the recommended population to be the first to receive the vaccine: the elderly in long-term care facilities and health workers, Tan said.

In places like California, for example, where virus cases are skyrocketing and hospitalization rates are overwhelming, facilities are a good idea to administer vaccines to healthcare workers who can then develop a fever – one possible side effects of the vaccine, but also a symptom of Covid-19 – which would keep them from working, if only for a short time, when hospitals need all the help they can get.

“You can imagine that health care systems, with the increase in the number of patients and needing the full availability of their staff, are going to be much more deliberate with how they immunize their staff,” Tan said. “You are not going to vaccinate them all at the same time”, or even half of them at the same time.

“ Just get things done, ” says surgeon general

“Get these vaccines where they’re going to be taken,” Adams told NBC “Today” Tuesday. “We don’t need to recreate the wheel, we just need to roll it.”

Some states have started to act even faster to expand the pool of people eligible for a vaccine, but this has created its own problems. In Florida, after those 65 and over were allowed to get the shot, people lined up for hours and supplies were quickly depleted.

President-elect Joe Biden has set an aggressive target of 100 million shots in his first 100 days in office. This would vaccinate 50 million people, because vaccination requires two separate doses for each person.

This is a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of withholding half of vaccine production in the United States to ensure second doses are available.

While this is a risky strategy, given that the two vaccines now approved in the United States require two doses, given at specific intervals, a transition official said Biden’s team believes vaccine makers will be able to produce enough second doses on time; Biden’s team plans to use the Defense Production Act to produce vaccines and other materials.

Biden said he will establish and support federal immunization centers across the country with help from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, CDC, military and National Guard.