State changes may mean less first dose COVID-19 vaccines for rural counties
The state’s new vaccine distribution policy is causing uncertainty in rural counties across the Upper Peninsula.
If demand for the vaccine continues to outweigh supply, county officials are unable to predict how many first doses they will get each week.
MCHD Health Officer Jerry Messana, told the Marquette County Board of Health that individual health departments will no longer be able to order a weekly amount of first dose vaccines from the state.
“So in the past we would get a Survey Monkey and we would say how many doses of first vaccines, how many doses of second vaccines,” Messana said. “Now the only thing that we have to request, or we can request, is second dose vaccines. First dose vaccines are going to be allocated based on a formula that the state has come up with and I have some details of that, but not all of the details.”
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The Mining Journal newsroom has received more than a handful of calls recently from local residents wondering and worrying about the COVID-19 vaccine specifically, when the essential medicine will be available here and where.
Specific answers to those apparently simple questions have proven elusive to our professional news staff: We’re told there isn’t a whole lot of the vaccine around and local officials are giving out shots as quickly as they can.
If you’re in your late 60s and prone to pneumonia, those answers aren’t providing a great deal of confort.
On Friday, Mining Journal readers learned that Marquette County Health Department Health Officer Jerry Messana said that less than 5% of the department’s vaccine supply remains in the freezer. Through its vaccine clinics for ages 65 and older, the department has been averaging 600 vaccinations per day, the Journal story detailed.
Next up, according to state plans: staff and the mostly elderly residents of long-term facilities that account for more than a third of the state’s overall coronavirus death total, which has surpassed 11,000.
But with initial doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine still scarce, county health departments and local hospitals are faced with difficult choices on how to prioritize vaccines after these top-level groups.
“These are incredibly difficult decisions,” Jeffrey Byrnes, a Grand Valley State University philosophy professor and medical ethicist, told Bridge Michigan.
“This is a real high wire act. This is the kind of thing that 10, 20 years ago would have been drafted as a hypothetical and perhaps overly dramatic textbook problem. Now we are facing this in real time.”
As early doses of COVID-19 vaccines arrive in Michigan, there’s no dispute over who’s first in line: front-line hospital workers and medical first responders who have battled the virus for months.
Next up, according to state plans: staff and the mostly elderly residents of long-term facilities that account for more than a third of the state’s overall coronavirus death total, which has surpassed 11,000.
This story was co-published with Bridge Magazine.
But with initial doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine still scarce, county health departments and local hospitals are faced with difficult choices on how to prioritize vaccines after these top-level groups.