Frustration, Blame Game Surrounds Delay to Vaccinate Long Term Care Facilities
A COVID-19 vaccine is prepped for a senior citizen at the Caledonia Senior Living and Memory Care nursing home in North Riverside January 12. Thousands of doses intended for long term care facilities have yet to be distributed. (Photo Caption: Chicago Tribune)
There may be many adjectives to describe how the vaccination rollout is going in Illinois, and the United States generally, but “smoothly” isn’t one of those words.
Illinois moved into the so-called “Phase 1B” Monday, meaning anyone over the age of 65 and workers in schools, grocery stores, and many other “frontline essential” industries are eligible to get vaccinated.
Just because the state has moved into the next phase doesn’t mean it’s done vaccinating everyone in the first phase.
Most health care workers eligible for the vaccine have gotten one, but more than 400,000 doses set aside for residents and staff of long-term care facilities are still in vials and not arms. And there’s plenty of blame to go around for the delays.
“We are all suffering right now,” said Paul Gaynor, a spokesman for the group Illinois Healthcare Heroes, a coalition of nursing homes across the state. “These nursing homes are suffering but what we need right now is the support from the state in the meantime.”
Many long-term care facilities may have scheduled vaccination dates in the next few weeks, but that’s not soon enough for many people the CDC deemed to be among the most vulnerable for severe cases.
“In the spring it was (a shortage of) supplies and protective gear and now we see there’s a big delay in getting the vaccine,” he said.
Adding insult to injury, Gaynor said nursing homes were also dealing with a “tsunami” of lawsuits from nursing home residents who have contracted COVID-19 and the families of those who have died from it.
“Let us focus on what we need to focus on, which is the frontline workers and the health care heroes at this point providing the care, distributing the vaccine and not everyone being afraid, looking over their shoulders worried we’re going to get sued,” he said. “We’re going to get put out of business. We’re going to get blamed. This onslaught of predatory lawsuits and behavior from the trial lawyers, they’re unrelenting.”
He said “TV lawyers” started filing lawsuits right after Governor JB Pritzker’s executive order giving immunity protections for healthcare workers ended in June. A spokesperson for Pritzker didn’t respond to questions regarding whether he would consider reinstating that executive order.
Gaynor said he didn’t want to Monday morning quarterback while the game was still going on, but he said it starts at the top and trickles down from there.
“We are, in real time, still suffering the ramifications of the failure at the federal and state level,” he said. “The federal government (under the Trump Administration) seems to have left the states to fend for themselves a lot on this.”
On Monday, Pritzker, never a fan of the former president, blamed the Trump administration for the failure to get the vaccine to long term care facilities. Speaking at the unveiling of a mass vaccination site in suburban Tinley Park, Pritzker said the former president signed a deal with Walgreens and CVS to administer the vaccine and the companies have fallen behind their goals.
"One of the things that they did was they created this federal pharmacy partnership program with two large pharmacy companies to do all the vaccinating at our nursing homes and our various assisted living facilities,” Pritzker said. “We have about 1,700 of them across the state of Illinois. That program has gone exceedingly slow. And the federal government required that the number of vaccines be taken out of our entire allotment. All the vaccinations that are necessary for that entire group have been taken out already of our allotment and they sit on shelves because that federal pharmacy partnership is so slow at the job."
Pritzker isn’t escaping the heat though. The Illinois Department of Public Health’s data showed nearly a million unused doses as of Monday.
“I have a hard time reconciling how we have people who are literally in 24/7/365 skilled nursing and because they’re in an institutional setting, they’re having to wait until February to get vaccinated but somebody who lives on their own and can drive to the clinic can get a shot today,” said Sen. Chapin Rose (R-Mahomet). “It’s incomprehensible that Governor Pritzker has failed to finish off the 1A population at this point.”
Rose said he’s complained to the Pritzker Administration for weeks that their approach wasn’t working. He said the plan to have public health departments give health care workers their vaccines and allow CVS and Walgreens go to long-term care facilities made sense in December. Rose said now that public health officials are done with their half, it doesn’t make sense to wait for CVS and Walgreens to catch up.
“Pritzker’s had the National Guard out delivering vaccines out in Chicago for a month,” he said. “Why aren’t they down here doing that?”
The governor said he was optimistic that Illinois could receive more doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines after President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to step up distribution of the vaccine to Americans. However, the Illinois Department of Health’s own data showed there’s enough doses available to vaccinate everyone in Phase 1A.
Pritzker says most of the remaining doses were required by the federal government to be allotted to CVS and Walgreens for long term care facilities and are “sitting on shelves” while the pharmacies are delayed getting the vaccine out.
“It’s not a matter of not having enough vaccine at this point,” Rose said. “There’s plenty of vaccine to finish off 1A. It just isn’t done. There’s a reason why the CDC sent down the order of priority as we did and that was to protect the people who are most likely to suffer a severe, adverse health consequence from getting COVID.”
Pritzker says Walgreens and CVS have promised long term care facilities would be vaccinated by February 15th.
When asked if there were any changes in the State’s approach to vaccination on the horizon, we received no response from the Illinois Department of Public Health. IDPH’s website said it expected everyone in Phase 1A to be vaccinated “in the coming weeks”.
By all accounts, Illinois is staying the course with its vaccination plan. The state estimates there are 3.2 million people eligible for Phase 1B, three times more than the first phase. Getting all Illinoisans vaccinated was a Herculean task in the first place, but it’s not getting easier yet.