Qualified for COVID vaccine but can’t find it in Pierce County or WA state? Here’s why
Qualify for a COVID-19 vaccine but having a hard time finding one?
You are not alone.
Buckley Mayor Pat Johnson told the Tacoma-Pierce County’s Board of Health on Wednesday that she had to apply several times before getting a vaccination appointment scheduled.
“It’s not an easy process to go through,” Johnson told the board.
State Department of Health Secretary Dr. Umair Shah on Thursday acknowledged what everyone looking for a COVID-19 vaccine already knows.
“We know the reality is that we do not have enough vaccine supply that’s coming into the state,” Shah said in a media briefing.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department’s director of health, Dr. Anthony Chen, also acknowledged that there has been an issue in getting people immunized.
The local health department plans to create phone banks and set up COVID-10 vaccine schedulers to work with pharmacies to grapple with the scheduling backlog.
“We need people to be patient on this,” Chen said in an interview with The News Tribune on Thursday. “Remember the iPhones, people would line up, right, and camp out overnight so they can get the newest iPhone and then it will sell out like after the first day or two and people got frustrated. But people dealt with it. They were able to say, ‘I can’t get the iPhone today, but maybe in a month I’ll get the iPhone.’
“So I think people need to realize at least the iPhone is for people who want an iPhone. We’re targeting 900,000 people in Pierce County, or at least 70-80 percent. So that’s a huge demand.”
The message from state officials who held a series of briefings with reporters on Thursday was that hopes are high the situation will change soon, with help from the Biden administration.
HOW WE GOT HERE
On Monday, Gov. Jay Inslee announced the expansion-acceleration into Phase 1B of vaccine distribution, allowing those age 65 and older and those age 50 and older in multigenerational households (two or more generations) to now be vaccinated.
The expansion means roughly 1.7 million people in Washington are now eligible for the vaccine.
The goal is 45,000 vaccinations statewide per day. The Biden administration’s goal is for 100 million vaccines administered in its first 100 days nationwide.
Providers are required to administer 95 percent of vaccine allocations within a week of receipt and submit vaccine data to the state within 24 hours of administration.
So far, the state effort has at least on paper fallen far short of that, with only about 15,500 doses administered per day, according to the most recent data from the state’s Department of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard.
The state in total has seen 335,836 vaccines given, 37,196 in Pierce County, according to state totals, while delivering 608,325 doses to providers.
Continuing reporting data lags account for some of the low number, and Inslee on Thursday said the numbers are improving.
“Over the last week, our average daily vaccinations have exceeded 16,000 doses a day,” he said. “And we expect that to continue to improve; the last 24 hours that went up to 25,000 doses that had been reported to the state.”
The local health department estimates that broader population groups will be able to get a vaccine by late spring or early summer.
STATEWIDE ISSUES
The problems with distribution have been multi-fold, starting with supply and planning for mass vaccination events.
As for when more doses would be made available from the federal government, the state as of Thursday didn’t have a clear indication.
“We do not have yet a timeline from the federal government,” Shah said at Thursday’s news briefing. “We’re anticipating as they continue to transition this week into next week that we’ll hear more information.”
Chen said he hopes the new administration takes politics out of public health policy.
“I think it’s just been really unfortunate that there has been so much politics around this. There was an explicit refusal to do a national vaccination plan,” he said. “Normally, leading a response like this, who would be upfront, the head of CDC, the Surgeon General, and where were they during this? They were sidelined and marginalized. So, I hope that improves.”
Washington, along with other states, has moved to the first tier of Phase 1B, but Phase 1A isn’t quite finished. Moving forward, there’s not enough supply currently available to vaccinate the next wave quickly.
Phase 1A included health care workers, first responders and long-term care facility staff and residents.
Tim Lynch, chief pharmacy officer for MultiCare, told The News Tribune on Tuesday so far just over 50 percent of its employees had been vaccinated.
“I think like all patients, there were some initial questions regarding the vaccine efficacy and other constraints,” Lynch said. “I think that may have led to a little bit slower start than what we had anticipated. We also did a survey before we went live with vaccinations to try to gauge interest. And it is close to what we anticipated from that survey around people wanting the vaccine.
“There were a number that were on the fence about getting it, but there was also a portion that were eager to get it, and then there were a portion that decided not to get it.”
Eric Wymore is vice president of Pharmacy Services for CHI Franciscan, now part of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health. Wymore told The News Tribune on Tuesday that about 70-75 percent of its staff has been vaccinated.
Of those who’ve declined, “Most have just chosen to hit the pause button or wait and see how folks do over the first couple of months,” he said.
Shah on Thursday defended the governor’s move to expand those qualified to get vaccines amid the limited supply.
“it’s either too much, too little, fast enough or too slow,” Shah said.
“The reason that we felt that we could go to the 1B phase was because in the 1A phase we had enough of the health care workers, not all of them, but enough of the health care workers vaccinated that ... we felt that we could go into 1B.
“There’s a science of public health, there’s an art of public health, and you don’t always get it just exactly right. But you’re doing the best you can. We were hearing from a lot of community members and a lot of partners who were saying we’re ready to go into 1B, just open up ... So it was really doing everything we could to balance both the health-care workers and the long-term care facility workers with also opening up to seniors and those in multi-generational households above the age of 50.”
He added the state needed to go ahead and broaden its work toward distribution ahead of the vaccine deliveries.
“So we are building that capacity right now in advance. So it’s there, which means that we will get potential criticisms about, ‘Well, why did you build it up when you didn’t have vaccine?’ ” Shah said. “Again, the art and the science and also not not having something exactly perfect, because we’re trying to balance so many different perspectives.”
It’s not just supply at issue. On Thursday, The Seattle Times reported that special vaccine software to streamline data input into the state’s immunization registry didn’t launch until Jan. 15, hampering the state’s ability to see vaccination progress in real time as providers struggled to manually input data.
PIERCE COUNTY ISSUES
To help move along to Phase 1B, Pierce County this week approved $4 million needed for COVID-19 mass vaccination from its reserves. An amendment was added that if federal or state funding to administer COVID-19 was available, it would supplant the county’s funds.
Chen anticipates details surrounding Pierce County mass vaccination events would begin to be shared next week.
The governor Thursday offered some new details, saying sites across the state would be “staffed significantly by the Washington state National Guard to do both logistics work and actual vaccination work.”
Chen told The News Tribune that partnerships with health care providers and Pierce County have created the needed infrastructure to roll out the vaccine.
He said flu-shot mobile clinics across the county were a “test run” for the COVID-19 vaccination. The health department collaborated with Pierce County Emergency Management to give flu shots across Pierce County, including more remote areas such as Carbonado.
But there have been difficulties.
“You have to understand this is the biggest rollout we have seen in our lifetimes,” Chen said.
Some of the vaccines allocated to Pierce County have gone to adult assisted-care facilities and long-term care facilities, but smaller facilities have been challenging.
Chen recalled that some did not have thermometers at the beginning of the pandemic and reached out to the health department when there was a national shortage.
“Their resources are pretty stretched in adult-family homes,” Chen said.
During the governor’s news conference Thursday, it was reported that 2,400 care facilities in Washington state signed up for the National Long Term Care pharmacy program run by CVS and Walgreens, and that the two companies have told the state that all sites will have received their first vaccine visits by Sunday (Jan. 24).
There has been a delay in registering health care providers as vaccine administrators. Until the last few days, Pierce County only had 20 or so health care providers signed up, health department staff said in a presentation to Pierce County Council on Tuesday. That number recently increased to 89 providers.
Even dermatologist and ophthalmologist offices have signed up to immunize, Chen said.
When providers do become vaccine administrators, their phone lines are slammed with calls, staff told the council. The health department wants to put vaccine schedulers in place at pharmacies and clinics to help answer calls.
“One of the things we’ve learned is once the word is out that you have the vaccine, your phone line gets swamped,” health department staff said in the Tuesday meeting.
Chen told The News Tribune the health department is creating a phone bank that will help people seeking vaccinations to navigate the system.
“It’s for those who have difficulty accessing websites or setting up the phone line. That’s to help walk them through the process, get them into phase finder, helping them locate clinics,” he said. “But we know we need to find a better system than that, right? Because if we end up having to call 10 clinics for someone, that doesn’t work.”
MultiCare and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health officials told The News Tribune this week their phone banks also were swamped as patients try to get on waiting lists with their providers.
“When we release appointments on our website, they go pretty quickly. And so what I would just advise is people to be patient,” said Wymore. “And if the system is not allowing them to, it’s just because we don’t have the available appointments.”
WHAT’S NEXT
Mass vaccination sites are expected to launch soon for Pierce County with decisions related to those sites being made Thursday, according to Inslee.
The governor also announced a standup clinic in partnership with Amazon for Seattle starting Sunday and said the state was also “engaging the entire pharmacy industry as a distribution network.”
President Joe Biden on Thursday signed a slew of executive orders and memorandums related to the federal pandemic response. While the federal government doesn’t plan on taking over states’ responses, it will bring more of an overall national strategy with plans for funding and mass vaccination sites with the help of the National Guard.
Information related to the national response is at whitehouse.gov/priorities/covid-19/.
Inslee said that while he felt the state had a better partner now in the White House to get vaccines, supplies are still the No. 1 issue.
“We will see more doses when the federal government gives us more doses,” Inslee said. “I just can’t create vaccines out of thin air and that’s the problem. So the whole state will see more doses when the federal government starts to produce more doses.”
Pierce County’s top health official said he is hopeful that as more companies ramp up production of vaccines, it will become easier to get immunized.
“There will be more vaccines coming, it’s just that we don’t have a whole lot now,” Chen said.
This story was originally published January 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
