PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The rollout of the coronavirus vaccine differs from state to state, county to county — a process that has confused administrators and recipients alike.
As such, leading the rollout for a major hospital has been frustrating for David Mihalic, director of vaccine distribution for Einstein Medical Center Montgomery in East Norriton.
Each week, they have to fill out a survey with the Pennsylvania Department of Health on how many vaccine doses they want and why. The state can see the hospital's remaining inventory — meaning, if they have vaccines sitting in the freezer — and they would need to explain why.
He said the state has to divvy up what they get from the federal government, so officials don't know exactly how much is coming until it's on a truck and on the way. Mihalic blames the lack of communication on the feds.
He said this is certainly not how it was drawn up in planning for a pandemic response.
"The best way to do that is to control as much as you can centrally and to not have it set up as distributed all over the country and let each little fiefdom or state control their own process."
He'd rather see centralized registration with a handful of mass vaccination clinics.
And, he said the patchwork way that distribution is handled is certainly not speeding up the process. The two-dose requirement complicates it further.
Still, requesting doses is easier than administering them, Mihalic said, because they have to get all kinds of data to start a record for each person getting the shot.
"I have to do all that logging and data-tracking and then have to find vaccinators, who may also be nurses treating patients somewhere else in the hospital, to find that time and get all those people in a room together — that's a bottleneck for administering these doses."
Mihalic said there are other options, like tossing out vaccine prioritization and just getting the shot into as many arms as possible. But there's an ethical argument with that, he noted, in trying to protect the people most likely to die or most likely to be exposed. Still, the more people vaccinated, the fewer places the vaccine has to thrive.
For now, he said they're working with the state and Montgomery County, as the county is building up the infrastructure to conduct 10,000 or more shots per week.
Eric's RX Shoppe, a neighborhood pharmacy in Maple Glen, is far smaller than Einstein's operation, yet it faces similar problems.
Along with prescriptions and over-the-counter medicines, owner Eric Abramowitz is giving out COVID-19 vaccinations — at least, he's trying to.
"It's difficult. We make requests each week for what we feel is an allotment that is fair to distribute, and it's been a little bit of a struggle, but we are getting vaccine every week," he said.
The pharmacy has been able to administer more than 1,000 vaccines so far.
Like Mihalic, the bureaucracy and paperwork are daunting, even more so since Pennsylvania expanded its eligibility.
"We didn't have any advance notification, and our phones just started ringing off the hook," recalled pharmacy partner Marc Ost. "We were getting thousands of phone calls a day, thousands of emails a day from everybody and anybody trying to get a vaccine. We're doing everything we can do, as many as we can."
Amid the chaos, Abramowitz said it is worth it.
"I've been a pharmacist for 30 years and this really has been the first time in my career … to really, fully give back to the community," he said.
