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Frances Watland, 89, was the first resident of The Lodge at Brookline in Oklahoma City to receive the COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 22, 2020. Employees of CVS gave the doses to residents and staff of the long-term care facility.
A federal program that sends retail pharmacists into nursing homes to vaccinate residents and workers has been hindered by bureaucratic hurdles and scheduling woes.
The effort to vaccinate some of the country’s most vulnerable residents against COVID-19 has been slowed by a federal program that sends retail pharmacists into nursing homes — accompanied by layers of bureaucracy and logistical snafus.
As of Thursday, more than 4.7 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines had been allocated to the federal pharmacy partnership, which has deputized pharmacy teams from Walgreens and CVS to vaccinate nursing home residents and workers. Since the program started in some states on Dec. 21, however, they have administered about one-quarter of the doses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.