Gov. Inslee: Pierce County is getting 100% of its COVID-19 vaccine share
Gov. Jay Inslee sent a clear message about Pierce County’s vaccine allocation Thursday during his weekly press conference on the state’s COVID-19 response:
“Bottom line: Pierce County’s getting 100 percent of its pro rata doses from the state of Washington,” the governor said. “This is clear, unequivocal fact, and anybody who says otherwise is simply wrong.”
While warning that Washington is entering a potential “fourth wave” of the pandemic and sharing that the state would have administered 5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine by the end of this week, he revisited the back-and-forth that has played out recently between the state and Pierce County.
The confusion started when Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier said Inslee’s staff had informed county staff that Pierce County had not been accepting all the vaccines it was offered. The state later blamed a “technical glitch” on the county unknowingly under-ordering doses and has since worked to catch up the county’s allocations.
Pierce County’s vaccination rate appears lower than the state average and many nearby counties on the state COVID-19 dashboard. It’s also one of three counties that recently slid back to Phase 2 of the state’s reopening plan because of its rising case rates and hospitalizations. That combination has been key to the ensuing drama.
Inslee addressed the situation Thursday, he said, to combat “misinformation” from a Republican state lawmaker. A spokesperson for Inslee’s office confirmed via email that a “big part” of what motivated the comments was a TV news station’s story featuring Sen. Chris Gildon of Puyallup asking that more doses be directed to Pierce County.
On Thursday, Inslee deferred to Nick Streuli, executive director of external affairs for the Office of the Governor, to explain.
“Vaccine allocation and distribution is a complex process,” Streuli began. “At this point in time, Pierce County has received exactly 100 percent of its proportional share of vaccines from the state. They’ve been allocated more than 488,000 doses, and we continue to work with their public health leaders to ensure our process is working.”
Multiple factors inform allocations each week, he said, including the pro rata population of eligible groups in a county; data from providers such as how much vaccine they want, populations they serve, and available vaccine storage; information about providers’ inventory; historical throughput of each provider; and whether they’re meeting the requirement to use 95 percent of doses delivered.
“Any time a county falls behind in pro rata, we engage very directly with that county to work quickly to catch them up and make sure we understand what happened,” Streuli said.
The federal government has “dramatically increased” the doses they directly send to providers, he added — more than 200,000 per doses per week, or 35 to 40 percent of doses delivered to the state, are sent straight to providers.
Where those direct allocations are delivered is outside the state’s control, Streuli said, and some providers don’t report those doses to the state. In that case, the data wouldn’t show up on the Department of Health’s online dashboard.
“The best example of this is the Department of Defense or Veteran’s Administration ...” Streuli said. “We know that tens of thousands of individuals have been vaccinated with these doses in Washington, civilian and military, many of them in Pierce County,” but he said that doesn’t show up in the state’s online tally.
Sen. Gildon released a prepared statement Thursday evening in response to Inslee’s comment that he shared misinformation, insisting Pierce has lagged behind other counties and citing the DOH dashboard. The statement didn’t address Streuli’s explanation regarding the complex allocation process and doses that don’t show up on the state’s system.
In a follow-up phone call, Gildon told McClatchy he can’t speculate on the unknown, such as vaccines distributed at Joint-Base Lewis McChord in Pierce County. But he insisted that, with everyone 16 and older eligible for the vaccine now, the state should send more doses to counties that have vaccinated a lower percentage of their population and are on the verge of tighter economic restrictions, referring to a bill he recently introduced to that effect.
County Executive Dammeier had made a request for more doses previously, and Inslee denied the ask, saying there were “misunderstandings and misrepresentations” about allocations, and pointing out the state’s been sending more doses than requested recently.
Dr. Anthony Chen, Pierce County’s top health official, has said the data is being over-scrutinized, as The News Tribune previously reported, and that the county is doing “just fine.”
When the TV reporter who reported the story featuring Gildon asked an unrelated question later in Thursday’s press conference, Inslee answered it before resurfacing the topic one more time.
“I do hope, also, that we made it clear about Pierce County on our vaccine numbers today, too, and I hope the public gets that information,” he said.
Dr. Dave Carlson, chief physician officer at MultiCare in Pierce County, also spoke at Thursday’s press conference, though not about the vaccine situation.
Carlson said it’s clear there’s a rise in cases in the community and a “slow increase” in hospitalizations. Those hospitalizations are being driven by younger people, he said, between ages 20 and 60 and largely people with underlying health conditions such as diabetes and obesity.
“The spike is not as fast as we’ve seen in other waves, and I think that is largely because of mitigation efforts, and primarily because of vaccination of the most vulnerable population,” he said.
MultiCare in Pierce County is seeing fewer intensive-care unit hospitalizations, fewer intubations, and quicker recoveries with easier discharges with many patients now younger and healthier to start — though they “may have longer-term effects of the disease,” Carlson said.
“If I could reassure our communities, at the current time MultiCare is well prepared to manage the safety and the people that need care in our community,” Carlson said. “Both those with COVID and those without.”
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