SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) – Jerry Shapiro, a 78-year-old Los Angeles pharmacist, tops the list of Californians eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, but more than a month after the state began inoculations, has not yet received any.
Shapiro said he has spent hours calling various health agencies and conducting unsuccessful computer searches, a family experience for many people in the United States, as the administration of President Joe Biden, a few days ago, is running to accelerate the slow deployment and chaotic vaccines in the country. .
“Why don’t you make it easy?” asked Shapiro, who is also worried about his wife because of medical conditions that would make her especially vulnerable to the virus. “You have it in your neighborhood. Make an appointment, make your shot and finish ”.
The United States is the country hardest hit by COVID-19, with 24.51 million cases and 409,987 deaths early Friday. More than 4,000 Americans died of the disease Thursday for the second day in a row.
However, the launch of vaccines, which the administration of former President Donald Trump left to states to carry out without a federal plan or sufficient funding, has proven to be annoying.
From California, where distribution has varied from county to county, to New York, where the country’s largest city is in short supply, states and health care providers have had difficulty purchasing, storing, and distributing vaccines.
“We’re consuming the supply,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio posted on Twitter on Friday. “We need more doses IMMEDIATELY to be able to protect the most vulnerable residents of our city. We need more doses to be able to fight ”.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said only 67 percent of New York health workers have received a dose of vaccine and warned that if the federal government does not find a way to increase production quickly, everyone would suffer.
“Hospital workers are the people who, if they get sick, will collapse hospital capacity,” Cuomo said at a news conference. “If hospital capacity collapses, we need to shut down the economy.”
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said the state’s immunization program had gotten 70 percent of the vaccine supply into people’s arms, but that a federal program in the state to help residents of nursing homes had only distributed 10% of the supply.
The country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Friday that the federal government had taken too much responsibility for distributing the vaccine to state governments.
“States were doing things that clearly weren’t the right direction, and that’s unfortunate,” Fauci told CNN.
Instead, he said, the administration should work with states to help them plan their deployment and make sure vaccines get into the arms of the people.
DISTRIBUTION CHALLENGES
Less than half of the nearly 38 million doses of vaccine sent so far by the federal government have reached the arms of Americans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Thursday.
Some states have lagged behind, as only a third or 40% of their vaccines are administered as of Thursday, marking the one-year anniversary of the first locally documented COVID-19 case transmitted in the United States. .
A key problem is to organize the distribution of vaccines to smaller clinics and pharmacies, rather than just large medical centers and retail drug chains.
In California, only a handful of independent pharmacies have been able to purchase vaccines for their customers, usually only in rural areas where there are no large chain stores, said Sonya Frausto, a pharmacist in the state capital of Sacramento.
Shapiro, owner of an independent pharmacy in downtown Los Angeles, said customers have called daily looking for vaccines, but he has to tell them he has no supply.
He and his wife finally made an appointment to receive a vaccine on Saturday, after repeated phone calls and waiting hours that took them to health giant Kaiser Permanente. The Shapiros are not members of the Kaiser, but the nonprofit organization offers them, however, Jerry Shapiro.
In Sacramento, restaurateur Jami Goldstene, 65, would feel much safer in her public job if she got a vaccine. He is technically eligible for his age, but he has not yet been offered an appointment (he has not even found a way to arrange it) despite the hours on the phone and on the Internet.
“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “I want to end this. I want to feel safe again. ”
Sharon Bernstein Report to Sacramento, California; Additional reports by Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani in New York, Lisa Lambert in Washington, Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas, and Anurag Maan in Bengaluru; Edited by Frank McGurty and Matthew Lewis