Thread by @DrEricDing

Vaccine distribution chaos—“Another 800 #monkeypox vax doses sent to Minnesota —a significant portion of the state’s total allotment —were unusable because the shipment was lost in transit for longer than the 96-hour “viability window.” 🧵

By @apoorva_nyc
nytimes.com/2022/08/15/hea…

2) “Until recently, orders for Jynneos had to be placed via email instead of an automated system—state officials often did not know where their deliveries were or whether they had been sent at all. Some arrived without labels saying they contained vaccines or needed cold storage”

3) “Officials in at least 20 states and jurisdictions have complained about the delivery of the vaccine, called Jynneos. (Over half are led by Democrats, including California, Washington, Connecticut and Michigan, suggesting that their grievances are not politically motivated.)

4) “This is happening everywhere,” …
“Our response is completely inefficient and breaking the back of state and local responders,” she added. Ms. Hannan said she had never “seen this level of frustration and stress.”

5) “But Jynneos is being disbursed from the National Strategic Stockpile by a different government agency under HHS. That agency was never set up to take ongoing orders, arrange deliveries from the stockpile, track shipments or integrate with state systems.”

6) Instead, the stockpile was designed to deliver massive amounts of vaccine to each state in response to a catastrophic event, according to a federal official. The stockpile is intended to be “pushing products out — it’s not an ordering-based system,” the official added.

7) As of now, the stockpile is shipping monkeypox vaccine to just five sites in each state, regardless of its size. State officials must distribute the doses, track manually and enter the data into their databases—none of which would have been necessary under C.D.C.’s system.

8) “We had no way to track vaccine shipments, when they actually shipped or when they were going to arrive,” Chris Van Deusen, director of media relations at Texas Department of State Health Services, said in an email. “They just showed up with no notice.”
nytimes.com/2022/08/15/hea…

9) HHS officials two weeks ago switched to a different system, used to deliver antiviral drugs from the stockpile. But that system is also not linked to state immunization databases, and it is not well suited to monitoring the special conditions needed for transporting vaccines