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
Across the country, some nursing home directors and health care officials say the partnership between federal government and pharmacy retailers is actually hampering the vaccination process by imposing paperwork and cumbersome corporate policies on facilities that are thinly staffed and reeling from the devastating effects of the coronavirus
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.