TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) – Terry Beth Hadler was so eager to get a life-saving vaccine against COVID-19 that the 69-year-old piano teacher was in line at night in a parking lot with hundreds of other older people.
I wouldn’t do it again.
Hadler said he waited 14 hours and a fight nearly erupted before Tuesday morning when people lined up outside the library in Bonita Springs, Florida, where officials were offering shots in order of arrival at 65 p.m. older.
“I’m afraid the event was widespread,” he said. “I was petrified.”
The race to vaccinate millions of Americans begins at a slower, more messy pace than public health officials and leaders of the Trump administration’s Warp Speed operation had expected.
Overworked and underfunded state public health departments are struggling to combine vaccine administration plans. Counties and hospitals have taken different approaches, leading to long lines, confusion, frustration and jammed phone lines. A multitude of logistical concerns have complicated the process of trying to overcome the scourge that has killed more than 340,000 Americans.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking for patience, though the supply of vaccines is limited.
“It may not be for everyone today, it may not be next week. But over the next few weeks, as long as we continue to get the supply, you will have a chance to get it, ”he said on Wednesday.
Dr. Ashish Jha, a health policy researcher and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said the main problem is that states do not receive adequate financial or technical support from the federal government. Jha said the Trump administration, mainly the Department of Health and Human Services, has established that states fail.
“A lot of states still need to be done,” he said, “but you need a much more active role for the federal government than they’ve been willing to do. In large part, they’ve told states, ‘That’s your responsibility. Find out.’ . ‘”
Delays in reporting vaccination figures partly explain why many states are failing to meet their year-end targets, but officials blame the slow-paced logistical and financial hurdles.
Many states do not have the money to hire staff, pay overtime, or reach the public. The equipment needed to keep vaccines cold complicates their distribution. In addition, providers must monitor the vaccines so that they have enough to dispense the necessary second doses 21 days after the first.
Dr. James McCarthy, chief executive officer of the Hermann Memorial in Houston, said the hospital system has administered about half of the approximately 30,000 doses it has received since Dec. 15.
The system had to create a plan from scratch. Among other things, administrators had to ensure that everyone in the vaccination areas could socially distance themselves and had to build a 15-minute observation period for each patient so that recipients could be monitored for any side effects.
“We can’t just hand them out like candy,” McCarthy said.
Pasadena, California, vaccinates its firefighters in groups of 50 people after they have finished the two days of work so they can recover during their four days off. “We don’t want most of our workforce (if they experience side effects) to be out at the same time,” city spokeswoman Lisa Derderian said.
In South Carolina, state lawmakers are wondering why the state has administered only 35,158 of the 112,125 doses of Pfizer it had received Wednesday. State Sen. Marlon Kimpson said officials told him some front-line health workers are rejecting the vaccine, while others are on vacation.
Lin Humphrey, a college professor whose 81-year-old mother lives with him in a high-rise apartment in Miami, said it cost him about 80 calls to call someone at a Miami Beach hospital that began inoculating people. great last week.
“It reminded me of the’ 80s when you had to call a radio station to be the tenth to call to get tickets for the concert, ”Humphrey said. “When I finally passed, I cried on the phone with the woman.”
Over the past few weeks, Trump administration health officials had spoken out about the goal of sending enough vaccine by the end of the month to inoculate 20 million Americans. But it is unclear whether the United States will achieve that mark.
Army General Gustave Perna, head of operations at Operation Warp Speed, said Wednesday that 14 million doses had been shipped across the country so far. Monitoring by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that as of Wednesday, nearly 2.8 million injections had been given.
Officials said there is a delay in notification of vaccines, but that they continue to happen more slowly than expected. Perna predicted that the pace would increase next week.
“We agree that this number is lower than we expected,” said Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientist at Warp Speed.
On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden said the Trump administration “lags far behind” and vowed to pick up the pace once he takes office on Jan. 20. In early December, Biden promised to distribute 100 million shots in the first 100 days of his administration.
Jha said Biden’s goal is ambitious but achievable.
“It won’t be easy if what they pick up on January 20 is infrastructure that isn’t ready to run on the first day,” he said.
In Tennessee, health officials had wished to reach the goal of dispensing 200,000 doses by the end of the year, but delays in shipments could prevent that from happening. Health officials said the state on Tuesday received 20,300 doses that were expected to arrive last week.
“We couldn’t do anything about it,” said Dr. Lisa Piercey, Tennessee’s health commissioner.
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Kunzelman reported from College Park, Maryland. Associated Press reporters John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia; Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles; Adriana Gómez Licon in Miami; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City; Lauran Neergaard in Alexandria, Virginia; Marion Renault in Rochester, Minnesota; Michael Schneider in Orlando, Florida; Desiree Mathurin in Atlanta; and Michelle Liu in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.