CVS & Walgreens Blamed For Slow Vaccine Rollout In Nursing Homes
CVS on Monday touted its nationwide progress vaccinating residents and workers in long-term care facilities against COVID-19. The drugstore chain announced it has administered its entire batch some 2 million shots of first doses in the nearly 8,000 nursing homes working with CVS.
That milestone is unlikely to allay complaints that CVS and Walgreens, the other major pharmacy chain tapped by the federal government to inoculate vulnerable populations in nursing homes, assisted living centers and other health providers, are falling short. Critics say the vaccine rollout to long-term care residents has been ill-planned and mismanaged, raising the death toll.
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Long-Term Care Pharmacists Express Concern Over CVS and Walgreens Delivering COVID-19 Vaccine to Nursing Home Patients, National Survey Shows
81 percent have low confidence in the giant chains hired by the government to immunize long-term care facilities NCPA December 16, 2020
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Dec. 16, 2020) A large majority of pharmacists who specialize in long-term care worry that CVS and Walgreens do not understand the nursing home environment and are not prepared to deliver the COVID-19 vaccine without major challenges, a new national survey finds.
“Patient needs in the long-term care environment can be much more nuanced than the general retail environment, and the survey showed concerns about the potential unintended consequences of allowing the big chains to have exclusive responsibility to immunize those patients,”
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The first vaccine to prevent COVID-19 has been cleared for use in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration on Saturday granted emergency use authorization to Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 16 years old and older. The first shipments began leaving facilities on Sunday.
The FDA’s decision was based on data from its Phase 3 clinical study, whose results were published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine and which saw a 95% vaccine efficacy rate. The two companies continue to gather additional data and prepare a biologics license application for full approval from the FDA in 2021.