PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Residents across Pennsylvania who are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine continue to be frustrated when trying to sign up for an appointment.
Part of the confusion is simply who people should sign up with. With dozens of pharmacies, hospitals, health systems, and counties offering the vaccine and supply so limited, Montgomery County Commissioner Dr. Val Arkoosh said there is no “centralized scheduling portal,” a decision that came from the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
What this means is that residents have to check with pharmacies about their appointment process.
“Getting on multiple lists obviously creates inefficiencies in the system,” Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam said in a Pennsylvania Senate Health and Human Services hearing.
Beam said they’re concerned that people signing up on multiple lists then not showing up for scheduled appointments could possibly be wasting vaccine.
She said the department is sticking with their provider partners, because they’re the ones who know best how their community works and can make distribution as equal and efficient as possible.
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Everyone across the country acknowledges the major issue is a lack of vaccine.
But as Montgomery County state Sen. Bob Mensch puts it, with the registration issues, “We have a real downstream mess. It’s not just the federal government.”
Pennsylvania continues to rank near the bottom of states in the percentage of vaccine received that’s actually been shot into arms.
Q&A with Gov. Tom Wolf
KYW Newsradio’s Jim Melwert also asked the governor about residents’ concerns and frustrations, and discussed whether or not the state should move to a centralized registration system.
Q: “I understand the primary issue is scarcity of vaccine. But right now, most, many if not most, places offering vaccine, even the national chains, don’t even have waitlists where people can sign up. The ones that do are saying that it could be months before they get through their backlog. It’s creating a system where people who spend hours online or on the phone can find doses, but the very people that your administration’s been talking to, that you’re aiming to protect have no chance because they’re out delivering mail or teaching or stocking shelves, or just flat out don't have the skills to navigate dozens of these websites. What can or should be done to make the system fair to get those people who are eligible to be able to register then properly wait their turn in line.”
A: “Well, first of all, let me acknowledge that supply is an issue. But as I said many times before, we can do — we need to do a better job figuring out how to address the issues that you raised there. We had a system in place, but as you pointed out, we need to continue to figure out how we can make it much, much better, so that everybody has access.”
Q: “Would it make sense to move to a centralized registration system?”
A: “That, another issue is maybe regional registration. There’s a little bit of the grass is always greener on the other side of the street. The initial rollout, we had 1,500 centers all around the commonwealth, and the idea was that that would put these centers closer to the populations that they’re serving. If you tried to go to one of these places and you haven’t been able to get through, either on the phone or because the website doesn't have the capacity for as many people who are calling in, then you see that’s a problem and say, ‘well maybe we ought to have more centralized registration.’ We want — the goal should be to get the vaccine into the arms of as many Pennsylvanians as quickly as possible. That’s what I’m gonna be working on, that’s what I had been working on, and I acknowledge we need to do a better job at doing that.”