Frustration is building over the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations at long-term care sites, where some homes still await first shots while fending off a virus that
Tom Murphy January 31, 2021 - 6:19 AM
Frustration is building over the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations at long-term care sites, where some homes still await first shots while fending off a virus that can devastate their residents.
The major drugstore chains tasked with giving shots in these places are far along in vaccinating nursing home residents and staff. But some other types of group residences won t receive first doses until mid-February or later, despite being among the top priorities for shots.
CVS and Walgreens have started a massive vaccination push in nearly all states, and they say they are proceeding on schedule. But resident advocates and experts are anxious about delays in delivering vaccines that have been available for more than a month.
Mississippi s state health officer, Dr. Thomas Dobbs, said the partnership has been a fiasco.
The state has committed 90,000 vaccine doses to the effort, but the pharmacies had administered only 5% of those shots as of Thursday, Dobbs said. Pharmacy officials told him they re having trouble finding enough people to staff the program.
Dobbs pointed to neighboring Alabama and Louisiana, which he says are vaccinating long-term care residents at four times the rate of Mississippi. We re getting a lot of angry people because it s going so slowly, and we re unhappy too, he said.
Many of the nursing homes that have successfully vaccinated willing residents and staff members are doing so without federal help.
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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