Some people in Philadelphia receive coronavirus vaccines even though they may not be eligible, and the city has not figured out how to stop it.
The Commissioner of Health, Dr. Thomas Farley said Friday that people have been sending vaccination dating links to other people for weeks, but the company in charge of running the dating software has yet to fix the problem. As a result, some people who use another person’s dating link receive shots, even though they shouldn’t be able to do so yet.
Despite the problem, the city has not taken any screening measures to ensure the right people are vaccinated, Farley said.
“They may be medically eligible, but they were not necessarily the people who were invited,” the commissioner said. “So if they are there, we will vaccinate them and continue to vaccinate them.”
The reason for this is that one of the city’s goals is to inoculate people as quickly as possible, so moving some away from them, even if they shouldn’t have had an appointment, would be counterintuitive, Farley noted.
However, he begged people not to jump the line for his shot. He said the city and the company that manages the software for vaccine appointments are working on some sort of “solution for early next week, but it has not yet been definitively resolved.”
Next week, Philadelphia expects to receive about 19,800 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 15,600 doses of the Modern vaccine, Farley said, adding that the federal government is also allocating about 5,000 doses of Modern to local pharmacies.
As of Sunday, Feb. 28, some 234,000 people had received the first vaccine and 110,000 had received the second, Farley said. Of those vaccinated, approximately 23% are black, 4.5% are Hispanic and 6.4% are Asian.
Philadelphia also expects about 13,100 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Because this vaccine is only a single dose, the city recommends that health care providers prioritize the vaccine for people who are hard to reach, such as transient people and those who are at home, Farley said.