Experts are frustrated after months of inconsistent data and worried that a mass vaccination plan may fail
Last game on September 3, 2020 at 15:45 BST
Millions of Americans rely on a Covid-19 vaccine to curb the pandemic and bring life back to normal.
While there may be one or more characteristics by the end of this year or early next year, the path to delivering vaccines to a population of 330 million remains dubious for local fitness officials who are expected to do the work.
“We haven’t gotten much data on how this will unfold,” said Umair Shah, executive director of the Harris County Department of Public Health in Texas, which includes Houston.
In a four-page memorandum this summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked fitness departments across the country to draft immunization plans through October 1 “to coincide with the earliest imaginable launch of the Covid-19 vaccine. “
But fitness that hasn’t received enough funding for decades says it has recently lacked staff, cash and equipment to teach others about vaccines and then distribute, administer and track millions of doses. They also don’t know when or if they’ll get federal assistance to do so.
Dozens of doctors, nurses, and fitness officers interviewed through Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press expressed fear of the country’s willingness to conduct mass vaccinations, such as frustration over months of inconsistent federal information.
The gaps arise by figuring out how public officials will track who won what dose and how they will keep the staff administering the injections safe, with enough protective devices and syringes to do their job.
And since only a portion of Americans say they will be vaccinated, according to a survey through the AP-NORC Public Affairs Research Center, it will also be to teach others about the benefits of vaccination, said Molly Howell, who administers North Dakota. . Vaccination program of the Ministry of Health.
The unprecedented rate of vaccine progression has left many Americans skeptical about protecting vaccines that oppose Covid-19. Others simply do not accept as true with the federal government.
“We’re in a very red state,” said Ann Lewis, ceo of CareSouth Carolina, a networked gym organization that primarily serves other low-income people in five rural counties in South Carolina, a state that reliably votes republicans. “The message that comes out is not a message of confidence in medical or clinical evidence. “
The United States has committed more than $10 billion to expand new coronavirus vaccines, but has allocated cash in particular for vaccine distribution and administration.
And while states, territories, and 154 major cities and counties have earned billions in congressional emergency investments, this cash can be used for a variety of purposes, adding evidence and payment.
Ongoing research through KHN and AP detailed how state and local public aptitude in the United States has been out of budget for decades and that the federal budget for coronavirus has taken time to succeed in public fitness.
States are allowed to use some of the federal money they have already earned to prepare for vaccination, but the survey found that many fitnesss are as far surpassed by existing pandemic prices, such as testing and touch search, that they do not set aside cash for long-term vaccines.
Health will be required to rent to others to administer vaccines and tracking systems, and pay for materials such as protective medical masks, gowns and gloves, as well as warehouses and refrigerator space.
CareSouth Carolina works with the State Department of Health on testing and reaction to the pandemic. He used federal investment to buy $140,000 renovated pickup trucks for cell tests, which he plans to continue to keep vaccines blood-free and deliver them to citizens when the time comes, Lewis said.
But the maximum price of vaccines will be new. Pima County, Arizona, for example, already has less than $30 million of fitness officials to deal with the pandemic, not to mention vaccine planning, said Francisco Garcia, deputy county administrator and leading physician.
Part of the federal budget will expire soon. The $150 billion that state and local governments earned from a fund in the Cares Act, for example, only cover the finish until the end of the year, said Gretchen Musicant, a fitness commissioner in Minneapolis. possibly hasn’t even started.
Although public fitness officials say they want more money, Congress left Washington for their summer vacation without passing a new pandemic relief bill that would come with more investment for vaccine distribution.
“States are eager to get that budget as soon as possible, so they can do whatever they want to be prepared,” said Kelly Moore, associate director of immunization education at Action Coalition for Immunization, a national vaccine education and advocacy organization in St. Louis. . Paul, Minnesota.
“We can’t assume they can take the existing investment and try the biggest vaccination crusade in history. “Then there’s the basic question of scale. The federally funded Vaccines for Children program immunizes 40 million young people a year. In 2009 and 2010, the CDC stepped forward to vaccinate 81 million others opposing the H1N1 pandemic. And last winter, the country distributed 175 million seasonal influenza vaccines, according to the CDC.
But for the United States to achieve collective immunity opposed to coronavirus, top experts say the country would have to vaccinate about 70% of Americans, which translates into two hundred million more people, and because the first vaccines would want two doses to be effective. , 400 million visits.
Although the CDC has overseen vaccination campaigns in the past, Trump’s leadership has created a new program, Operation Warp Speed, to facilitate vaccine progression and distribution.
In August, management announced that McKesson Corporation, which distributed H1N1 influenza vaccines for this pandemic, will also distribute Covid-19 vaccines to medical offices and clinics.
“With a few exceptions, our advertising distribution partners will be in charge of administering all vaccines,” said Paul Mango of Operation Warp Speed in an email.
“We’re not going to get three hundred million doses at once,” said Mango, deputy director of policy staff at the Department of Health and Human Services, despite promises passed through the government to prepare many doses through the new “We are maximizing our chances of having tens of millions of doses of vaccines through January 2021, which is our goal. “
Amesh Adalja, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety, said it will take time for vaccines to become widespread enough for life to return to what is considered normal. “We will have to be prepared to deal with this virus in the absence of vaccine-induced immunity for an era of a year or more,” Adalja said in August.
Initially for state vaccine managers, the CDC stated that doses will be distributed loose from a central location. Immunization plans for the local fitness service can be reviewed through cdc and Operation Warp Speed.
Cdc reviewed state and federal vaccination plans at locations: North Dakota, Florida, California, Minnesota, and Philadelphia.
No real vaccine was distributed in the plan-making sessions, which focused on how to bring vaccines to others in places as disparate as the city of Philadelphia, where pharmacies abound, and rural North Dakota, which has few pharmacy chains, but many clinics operate in the Federal Service of the Department of Indigenous Health Kris Ehresmann, who leads infectious disease control at the Minnesota Department of Health, said.
These plan-making sessions allowed Ehresmann to feel more confident about the duty to distribute vaccines. “We are now getting more explicit recommendations to develop CDC plans,” he said. “We feel more in the process, there are still many unknowns. “
However, many people in public health will find it difficult to adequately monitor who has been vaccinated and when.
In Mississippi, for example, fitness officers still rely on faxes, state fitness officer Thomas Dobbs said. “You can’t manually process 1,200 faxes a day and expect something effective to happen,” he said.
During this time, vaccinators will want medical grade masks, gowns, and gloves for themselves when handling rods.
Many fitness officers say they are burned by the country’s struggle to provide hospitals with non-public protective devices and appliances (PPE), such as disposable masks, gloves and gowns last spring.
These considerations are amplified through procedural difficulties in providing enough kits, assigning drugs such as remdesivir, and recruiting touch markers.
Although Ehresmann of Minnesota said she was involved in the state run out of syringes, she said the CDC had trusted that he would supply them.
Since vaccines are much more complex than non-public protective devices and other medical materials, a vaccine candidate will need to be stored at -94 F, Plescia said other people should be ready for scarcity, delays and confusion.
“This is going to be even worse than verification and PPE issues,” Plescia said.