Thread by @tmhohl71

1/n I read this article with tremendous interest and have some comments on this situation. Why are we in this situation? Conflicting forces are driving the vaccination process. At Elite Medical Centers, Even Workers Who Don’t Qualify Are Vaccinated nytimes.com/2021/01/10/hea…

2/n @sloan_kettering there was a deliberative and transparent process to identify and prioritize vaccination among patient-facing healthcare workers. However, hospitals in NY State were not yet allowed to offer vaccine to high-risk patients. Vaccine uptake is not uniform

3/n among priority patient-facing vaccine groups and since substantial financial repercussions were threatened if the vaccine was not administered very rapidly, this created an incentive to administer vaccine to other (lower risk) workers at academic medical centers. Remember

4/n that hospitals were not allowed to expand vaccination to patients. This is clearly a process issue and reflects poor planning at the state and federal level. If guidelines are overly restrictive (with regard to vaccine recipients), then rollout is frustratingly slow.

5/n If guidelines are more permissive, the rollout is more rapid and less targeted. I am very pleased that NYers >75 years old will soon have access to vaccine and that teachers and other public servants are included in this vaccination phase. I cannot emphasize enough that

6/n we need public, accessible, and low barrier to entry vaccine sites across our city, state, and nation, particularly concentrated in communities that have been hit the hardest by #SARSCoV2 - we need to open vaccine access and cannot do so without better federal and state

7/7 planning, cooperation, and execution. I am certain that my colleagues and I will volunteer at vaccine distribution sites and engage in vaccine education efforts to improve uptake - after all, we want to get the vaccine into as many arms as possible, as quickly as possible.

In other this words today’s article is the logical consequence of this order and restrictions placed on hospitals nytimes.com/live/2021/01/0…

The telling quote is “I don’t want the vaccine in a refrigerator. I want it in someone’s arm...So yes, I am being aggressive” @NYGovCuomo while threatening 100K fines. It’s easy to be selective, targeted, and slow. Easy to be fast and not selective. Very hard to be selective,

targeted and fast, particularly without an effective city- and statewide plan in action that covers the freezer to arm step and delegates this only to a few medical centers. This will now change, but where we are reflects a leadership failure at the executive level.