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MADISON, Wisconsin – On Tuesday morning, UW Health’s vaccine dashboard showed that the health organization only had 93 initial doses available and 22,353 people were due for vaccination.
“It’s really obvious that there just aren’t enough vaccines and that there really is a big mismatch,” said Dr. Matt Anderson, senior medical director of primary care at UW Health.
UW Health ended up receiving a shipment of 2,300 first doses later in the morning, but some appointments later this week will still have to be postponed due to a lack of supply.
“It’s definitely not something we would want to do. We’ve certainly advocated and tried to get more supply, but that’s the situation we’re in right now, ”Anderson said.
He said UW Health has spoken with the state about the number of older patients in hopes DHS will give them more vaccines. Anderson said that with 52,000 patients aged 65 and over, UW Health cares for about 6% of the state’s population in that age group.
But DHS does not take into account the number of vaccine-eligible patients a hospital system has in deciding where to allocate state doses. Rather, it looks at geographic location and capacity.
During a press briefing on Tuesday, DHS assistant secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk explained that this is why many pharmacies in Dane County have not received a vaccine this week.
“We asked 505 vaccinators for nearly 290,000 vaccines. And so we had to make a lot of tough decisions. And one of the tough decisions we made was that anyone whose allocation was less than 50 was not vaccinated, ”said Willems Van Dijk. “We have a huge number of vaccinators in Dane County, which means not all of them will get the vaccine because we have to keep the vaccine for other areas of the state.”
While DHS is also looking at how many doses vaccinators can deliver in a week, Dr Anderson said UW Health can deliver more than double the amount of vaccine allocated to it.
“We could administer over 7,000 first doses in a few weeks here, and then continue to administer our second doses. And at the moment, the supply is far from affecting our ability to use the vaccines in larger quantities, ”said Anderson.
At this rate, if UW Health continues to receive around 2,000 doses of the vaccine per week, it said it could be the end of April before every patient aged 65 and over has a chance to get the vaccine.
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