State says Pierce Co. has ‘not accepted’ all of the vaccines offered. Health dept disagrees
During Wednesday’s Tacoma-Pierce County Board of Health meeting, questions arose over why Pierce County was lagging in its vaccine distribution and had perhaps turned down vaccines.
Health officials pushed back on the assertions, stating no vaccines had been rejected, and also said the state had initially been off in its allocations.
The vaccine update presented at Wednesday’s meeting comes as the county teeters on falling back into Phase 2, according to warnings Wednesday from local officials.
As of April 3, the state Department of Health COVID data dashboard showed that the state had seen 30.77 percent of the population initiating vaccination statewide, and around 19.49 percent fully vaccinated.
That compares with Pierce County’s rates, also from April 3, of 24.9 percent of county residents initiating vaccination, and 16.36 percent fully vaccinated, according to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department’s data dashboard.
As of April 3, King County was reporting that 33.53 percent of its population has initial vaccines, and 19.93 percent fully vaccinated.
Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier and the Pierce County Council Chair Derek Young wrote a letter to Washington State Department of Health and Gov. Jay Inslee on March 29. The county elected officials asked the state “to appropriately allocate resources to meet the social and economic differences our community needs to access vaccines.”
“In summary, our county has the capability and is standing ready to meet and surpass the percentages of the state and neighboring counties if you will just give us the vaccine,” the letter obtained by The News Tribune said.
Dammeier said in Wednesday’s meeting that staff from Inslee’s office texted him: “For the last three weeks we’ve offered Pierce County additional vaccines to help catch up on a pro rata, and all that we’ve offered has not been accepted.”
“Pro rata” means proportional. Vaccine distribution has been allocated by county according to metrics including population and equity.
Pierce County’s top health official Dr. Anthony Chen said the accusation that Pierce County turned down vaccines is not true.
“I want to address the rumor that we’re turning down vaccines. It is absolutely false,” he said.
Stephanie Dunkel, TPCHD’s Assistant Division Director for Communicable Disease, told the board that the state made an error in calculating Pierce County’s proportion of vaccine doses.
“We did early on, about mid-March, get notice from our state partners that we were under pro rata,” she said. “That was immediately corrected by our state partners, and so since mid-March we’ve been receiving the appropriate weekly pro rata foundation. But what that meant is historically we’ve had a pro rata that we’ve been under.”
Dunkel said the state and the local health departments are still determining whether the county will receive the doses that should have been received by the county before mid-March.
Dammeier said he did not want to point fingers, but find a solution to get more vaccine doses to the county.
“This is absolutely essential,” Dammeier said in the meeting. “When you think about if we are the same percentage vaccinated as King County right now, that would be an additional 75,000 people in Pierce County vaccinated.”
Add to that, the state is now struggling with Johnson & Johnson’s issues reported last week when it had to dump doses produced at a Baltimore facility because of a production mixup.
“Next week, we expect to receive more than 380,000 doses of vaccine, which is a bit less than what we were hoping for,” said SheAnne Allen, COVID-19 vaccine director for the state DOH. “This includes close to 13,000 doses of Johnson and Johnson. And that’s the part that we were hoping for a larger application of that specific vaccine presentation.
“As many of you know, last week, nearly 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine were ruined at a manufacturing plant in Baltimore. … The good news is Johnson & Johnson tells us they’re still on track to meet their commitment for their target of 100 million vaccines available within the United States by the end of May.”
This story was originally published April 7, 2021 at 6:13 PM.
