My image of the IKEA furniture being dumped into the States still stands....
Dr Ashith Jha, from Brown University:
"The federal government created Operation Warp Speed to deliver vaccines to states. The amount of vaccine doses shipped to states has been lower than initially expected - dropping from estimates this fall of 100 million in December to recent updates of 20 million by early January - Jha noted, "But this is really not the worst part.
"The worst part is no real planning on what happens when vaccines arrive in states. No plan, no money, just hope that states will figure this out," he wrote.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, says he's 'incredibly frustrated' with the slow rollout of the coronavirus vaccines. He blames the federal government for not planning better and working more closely with the states on the "last mile" of getting vaccines into arms.
State health departments, typically underfunded, have been left to administer the vaccines, Jha wrote. There was "no effort" from the federal government to help states "launch a real vaccination infrastructure," he wrote. He suggested that the federal government should have started planning vaccination sites in October or November.
"The real issue is there was never a last mile plan," Jha said in the podcast. "There was never a plan to figure out how do we get vaccines from the states into people's arms."
I am so thankful that Texas appears to be more than capable of assembling Ikea furniture. That this “last mile” is a cluster for so many states isn’t surprising to me at all, but I’m in Texas, and things appear to be rolling out at a nice pace IMO.
Vaccines were going in arms within a day or two of the first shipments hitting the roads. I work in a long term care facility and honestly would’ve been pleased if we had any kind of access within a month of the vaccines rolling out.
Instead, we had all of the info from CVS right at 7 days later, including all of the consent forms, and they sent us 3 pharmacists yesterday, December 29th, promptly at 9am as promised with vaccines for everyone who indicated they wanted one, plus a 10% overage for anyone who changed their mind at the last minute.
The whole process was crazy smooth if you ask me. I never would’ve guessed this team hadn’t been running on-site vaccine clinics for years. They vaccinated all staff who wanted it (right at 25% of staff got vaccinated), then vaccinated all patients who wanted it (or their loved one who makes decisions for them wanted them to get it). Right at 95% of patients were vaccinated.
They will be back in 3 weeks for the second dose, and anyone who changes their mind in the meantime can get dose one at that time.
It seems to me from reading various comments from other states, Texas has done a few things “right” (or at least less wrong) than others. We’ve had near on-demand testing at anytime for many months. So I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that our vaccine roll-out seems to be going well.
All facilities in the state owned by my company have their scheduled vaccine dates (all done by CVS, all Pfizer vaccines). The latest dose one date that I saw was January 15th. Considering it took nearly all day to do just our building, that seems like a reasonable timeline to get to all long term care facilities that we own.
I could be wrong, but there also appeared to be some logic behind the order buildings were assigned dates. Hopefully other states will get with the program soon. Otherwise it’s going to be a giant disaster once rolled out to the general public several months from now if some states can’t even roll out very small numbers of vaccines in the grand scheme.
