UPDATED: Feb. 1, 11 a.m.
In mid-January, 85-year-old Doris Bloch of San Francisco heard the coronavirus vaccine was becoming available. She called the city’s health department and was put on hold for close to an hour. Feeling impatient, she hung up and called her doctor’s office, whose staff at first said they couldn’t help, but then eventually were able to schedule her an appointment for her first dose of the vaccine.
The soonest availability? Feb. 27.
“I thought, gee, that is a long time to wait,” Bloch said. “I’m 85. It’s a shame. It’s a damn shame.”
CVS and Walgreens blamed for slow vaccine rollout in nursing homes By Stephen Gandel AARP CEO: Nursing home deaths an unconscionable disaster
CVS on Monday touted its nationwide progress vaccinating residents and workers in long-term care facilities against COVID-19. The drugstore chain announced it has administered its entire batch some 2 million shots of first doses in the nearly 8,000 nursing homes working with CVS.
That milestone is unlikely to allay complaints that CVS and Walgreens, the other major pharmacy chain tapped by the federal government to inoculate vulnerable populations in nursing homes, assisted living centers and other health providers, are falling short. Critics say the vaccine rollout to long-term care residents has been ill-planned and mismanaged, raising the death toll.
CVS & Walgreens Blamed For Slow Vaccine Rollout In Nursing Homes
CVS on Monday touted its nationwide progress vaccinating residents and workers in long-term care facilities against COVID-19. The drugstore chain announced it has administered its entire batch some 2 million shots of first doses in the nearly 8,000 nursing homes working with CVS.
That milestone is unlikely to allay complaints that CVS and Walgreens, the other major pharmacy chain tapped by the federal government to inoculate vulnerable populations in nursing homes, assisted living centers and other health providers, are falling short. Critics say the vaccine rollout to long-term care residents has been ill-planned and mismanaged, raising the death toll.
Mississippi s state health officer, Dr. Thomas Dobbs, said the partnership has been a fiasco.
The state has committed 90,000 vaccine doses to the effort, but the pharmacies had administered only 5% of those shots as of Thursday, Dobbs said. Pharmacy officials told him they re having trouble finding enough people to staff the program.
Dobbs pointed to neighboring Alabama and Louisiana, which he says are vaccinating long-term care residents at four times the rate of Mississippi. We re getting a lot of angry people because it s going so slowly, and we re unhappy too, he said.
Many of the nursing homes that have successfully vaccinated willing residents and staff members are doing so without federal help.
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Frances Watland, 89, was the first resident of The Lodge at Brookline in Oklahoma City to receive the COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 22, 2020. Employees of CVS gave the doses to residents and staff of the long-term care facility.
A federal program that sends retail pharmacists into nursing homes to vaccinate residents and workers has been hindered by bureaucratic hurdles and scheduling woes.
The effort to vaccinate some of the country’s most vulnerable residents against COVID-19 has been slowed by a federal program that sends retail pharmacists into nursing homes accompanied by layers of bureaucracy and logistical snafus.
As of Thursday, more than 4.7 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines had been allocated to the federal pharmacy partnership, which has deputized pharmacy teams from Walgreens and CVS to vaccinate nursing home residents and workers. Since the program started in some states on Dec. 21, however, they have administered about one-quarter of