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LOS ANGELES
LOS ANGELES A former Arkansas health official is sounding the alarm about the pace of coronavirus vaccines being administered to residents of long-term care facilities under a U.S. plan he is launching. the major CVS and Walgreens pharmacy chains of many of the features.
According to the state Department of Health, less than 10% of the doses allocated to Arkansas seniors have been administered. The two pharmacies work with about 40% of the state’s facilities. Some of these were reported to be scheduled for February or March, said Dr. Joe Thompson, a former Arkansas general surgeon and chief executive of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.
“That’s not acceptable,” Thompson said. “We are seeing a failure in the deployment of CVS and Walgreens.”
In recent days, federal health officials have urged expanding vaccine eligibility to tens of millions of Americans to speed up the launch of the national inoculation program. Meanwhile, the elderly in some long-term care facilities, which account for about 1% of the U.S. population but 40% of COVID-19 deaths and were supposed to be at the forefront of the line, keep waiting.
State and local officials and long-term care operators in states like Florida, California, Arizona, Indiana and Pennsylvania told Reuters they have turned to alternative providers to vaccinate their residents or staff because pharmacy chains were scheduling shots for weeks. out.
Some 75,000 long-term care facilities signed up to receive vaccines from CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. under the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Pharmacy Association Program.
“I think they face serious bandwidth issues in terms of programming,” said David Grabowski, a professor at Harvard Medical School and an expert on health policy. “I find it very distressing that we didn’t do it faster. That’s really a matter of life or death.”
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Thursday in a statement that the two pharmacy chains assured him that all long-term care residents assigned to them would be vaccinated later this month.
Many states gave priority to households with patients in need of medical care, which contributed to the delay in other long-term care centers.
CVS said it plans to complete all shots at the assigned facility within nine to twelve weeks after the first dose. This means that states such as California, Florida, Arizona, Alabama, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, which were among the last to activate the second phase of facility vaccinations, may not be completed until April.
“State decisions about which facilities are activated when they have a significant impact on time,” said CVS spokesman TJ Crawford, who noted that the company has managed a million shots and is on track to its federal agreement.
Other hurdles included confirmation of vaccine availability, winter holidays, vaccination hesitation and new outbreaks of COVID-19, the companies said.
This resulted in “a slightly slower start than we expected. Now that we’re past the first of the year, you see a quick, rapid acceleration,” said Rick Gates, senior vice president of Walgreens Pharmacy and Healthcare. The company has fired more than 500,000 shots and plans to do so in March.
“OVERCOMED FOR VOLUME SHEER”
Meanwhile, Seminole County, in central Florida, is deploying mobile clinics to some assisted living facilities.
“We went because private providers didn’t contact them or they had questions because of some kind of problem,” county emergency manager Alan Harris said.
“I think CVS and Walgreens are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of long-term care centers in Florida,” Harris said.
The state of Florida has hired health services firm CDR Maguire to take over the vaccines at nearly 1,900 care centers that CVS or Walgreens had scheduled for Jan. 24 or later.
Los Angeles County has chosen not to partner with CVS-Walgreens and is asking facilities to be able to collect and administer the vaccine themselves. In Contra Costa County, Northern California, Choice in Aging, a nonprofit, teamed up with John Muir Health and Kaiser Permanente to help them.
The aging choice is geared towards facilities with six or fewer beds in historically underserved communities. “This is a population that is never prioritized,” said Debbie Toth, CEO of Choice in Aging.
The CDC said Thursday that 26% of the 4.7 million vaccine doses allocated to long-term care sites had been administered, up to the unfortunate 36% of the 30.6 million available nationwide. .
Graph: vaccine launch in nursing homes: here
West Virginia, which chose not to partner with the CDC Pharmacy Partnership, did extensive planning and took advantage of its existing network of long-term care pharmacies to quickly vaccinate nursing home residents in an effort. practical on deck, said Dr. Michael Wasserman, former president of the California Long-Term Care Association.
“Community pharmacies should be involved,” said Scott Knoer, CEO of the American Association of Pharmacists. “I wish they had been from the first moment.”
(Report by Lisa Baertlein and Deena Beasley; Additional report by Carl O’Donnell in New York; Edited by Peter Henderson, Bill Berkrot and Jonathan Oatis)