If you want to prioritize anyone, with COVID specifically you come to two conclusions about who you might want to prioritize first: the very old and any employee involved in front-line healthcare work.
For the former, there’s a Federally administered healthcare system specifically for anyone 65+. For the latter: they work within, are affiliated with, or have relatively straightforward access to hospitals and generally clean spaces to inject a vaccine. They are also showing a lot of disinterest in getting the vaccine, and many of them have already been infected and survived COVID.
So States largely don’t need to involve themselves in vaccinations for the 65+ but they can provide additional resources of necessary, if Medicare can do it instead, and I’ll go out on a limb and say health care workers should get priority. Fine, but by this point most of them have had the opportunity and accepted or declined, and the priority access should be time-limited, not based on what percentage of them chose to accept. The time has passed, let’s move on.
For everyone else, if someone shows up, wants the vaccine and you have it; inject it. Need more? Order more. Manufacturing is not the bottleneck at this point. Just getting a goddamned appointment is, and this is bottlenecked by stupid rules about who is allowed to get an appointment in some States including mine, because some people are sitting behind desks at home paid by the government throwing around words like “push for continual improvement”, “strategy” and “doing their best”.
You want a strategy? It’s called a factory line. I was always amazed whenever I walked into a Kaiser with a buddy of mine anytime she needed blood work and impressed by how they had industrialized the process of drawing large quantities of blood from up to 10 people at a time in a small office space in under 5 minutes. Never been to another hospital like it. Injecting people should look a lot like that, and if you need to spread people out like we do, that’s fine, there’s plenty of space when you’ve made this a national priority. We have nothing but space.
This is just nonsense. We are manufacturing quickly, but vaccine production absolutely remains the bottleneck. We will not have sufficient doses for everyone who wants a shot for several months.
That means people in Maryland are readily receiving the vaccine and between whoever has already been infected, those who are likely to survive infection with little consequence and the daily increase of people who are now vaccinated, the entire State of Maryland is becoming more resistant by the day which will do as much to mitigate risk to her parents as everything else.
A 95% effectiveness rate still means that every 5 out of a hundred vaccinated people will still be vulnerable to infection post-vaccination. Either one of her parents could be one of those 5.
Given we have now reached the point that society will refuse to open up properly until we have vaccinated tons of people, let’s get people vaccinated, lots of them and quickly.
My doctor's office has apparently received some vaccines but are only vaccinating people in Group 1A because they feel that's the most important. But the governor claims we've moved into Group 1C, and if I can snag an appointment with a different provider, I might be in luck.
