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 In New York, hospitals must administer vaccines within a week of
receiving them or face a fine and a reduction in future supplies,
Governor Andrew Cuomo said, hours before announcing the state's
first known case of a new, more infectious coronavirus variant
originally detected in Britain.
"I don't want the vaccine in a fridge or a freezer, I want it in
somebody's arm," the governor said. "If you're not performing this
function, it does raise questions about the operating efficiency of
the hospital."
New York hospitals on the whole have dispensed fewer than half of
their allocated doses to date, but performance varied from one group
of hospitals to another, Cuomo said. The NYC Health + Hospitals
system, the city's main public hospital network, has only
administered 31% of its allotment, compared with 99% for a few
private hospitals in the state.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported
an even lower vaccine uptake for New York overall, saying fewer than
one in five of the 896,000 doses shipped to the state since
mid-December have been given.
In Florida, where officials have put senior citizens ahead of many
essential workers for getting the vaccine, Governor Ron DeSantis
announced a policy under which the state would allocate more doses
to hospitals that dispense them most quickly,
"Hospitals that do not do a good job of getting the vaccine out will
have their allocations transferred to hospitals that are doing a
good job at getting the vaccine out," DeSantis said at a briefing.
"We do not want vaccine to just be idle at some hospital system," he
added, although he did not say they would face fines.
Florida, which has dispensed less than a quarter of the 1.14 million
doses it has received, according to the CDC, will also deploy an
additional 1,000 nurses to administer vaccines and will keep
state-run vaccination sites open seven days a week, DeSantis said.
UK VARIANT FOUND IN NEW YORK
Cuomo's announcement that the more contagious COVID variant known as
B.1.1.7 had been confirmed in a man in his 60s living in a town
north of Albany gave new urgency to the state's efforts to
accelerate vaccinations.
At least three other U.S. cases of the so-called UK variant have
been documented since last week, one each in Florida, California and
Colorado. None of the four patients has a recent travel history,
meaning the variant was likely spreading person-to-person within
each of the communities where it turned up.
Neither the UK variant, nor a similarly more contagious strain first
found in South Africa, is believed any more lethal than the original
form of the virus. Scientists say newly developed vaccines should be
equally effective against both.
But medical experts worry that the emergence of a more communicable
variant could accelerate a months-long surge of infections and
hospitalizations already straining U.S. healthcare systems to their
limits.
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 The U.S. death toll has climbed
to well over 350,000 out of more than 20 million
known infections, with the fatality rate
averaging 2,600-plus lives every 24 hours over
the past week. The staggering
human toll, together with an upending of daily social life and a
stifling of economic activity, has made the slower-than-expected
uptake of available vaccines all the more vexing to authorities.
'GOT TO DO BETTER'
Medical authorities have confronted widespread distrust of
immunization safety, even among some healthcare workers, owing in
part to the record speed with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed
and approved 11 months after the virus emerged in the United States.
But some U.S. officials also have cited organizational glitches in
launching the most ambitious mass inoculation campaign in the
nation's history in the year-end holiday season.
"The logistics of getting it going into the people who want it is
really the issue," the leading U.S. infectious disease specialist,
Dr Anthony Fauci, told MSNBC. "We're not where we want to be. No
doubt about that. "I don't think we can blame it all on vaccine
hesitancy."
The federal government has distributed more than 15 million vaccine
doses to states and territories across the country, but only about
4.5 million have been administered, the CDC reported.
Those figures put the government far short of its goal of
vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, although officials
said they expected the rollout would pick up significantly this
month. "We have got to do better, and we are going
to keep doing better, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS News in
an interview, adding he expected dramatic improvements over the next
two weeks.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health
Security, said New York and Florida were being "overly bureaucratic"
in penalizing hospitals over vaccine deliveries even as they coped
with soaring patient caseloads.
"Instead of fining hospitals, why not give them more resources to do
this, more money, more staffing?" he said in a telephone interview.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen, Carl O'Donnell, Rebecca Spaulding and
Peter Szekely in New York; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg,
Steve Gorman, Anurag Maan, Doina Chiacu, Brad Brooks and Susan
Heavey; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Howard Goller and Peter Cooney)
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