Most U.S. COVID-19 vaccines go idle as New York, Florida move to
penalize hospitals
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[January 05, 2021]
By Carl O'Donnell and Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -More than two-thirds of
the 15 million coronavirus vaccines shipped within the United States
have gone unused, U.S. health officials said on Monday, as the governors
of New York and Florida vowed to penalize hospitals that fail to
dispense shots quickly.
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.
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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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![](../images/010521PIX/news_d7.jpg)
A staff member at Hamilton Park Nursing and Rehabilitation, a
nursing home facility, receives the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus
disease (COVID-19) vaccine from Walgreens Pharmacist Craig Brandt in
Brooklyn, New York, U.S., January 4, 2021. REUTERS/Yuki Iwamura
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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.
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"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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