“Flu Vaccination Grippe” by Daniel Paquet is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of this year, my mother was eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine as part of Pennsylvania’s Phase 1A of distribution, which includes all residents over 65 and residents 16 to 64 years old with certain conditions which make them high risk for the virus. With her radiologist’s approval in March, I jumped online to find a vaccine appointment for her. This was no easy feat. Rite Aid and Walgreens were a bust, and CVS had no available appointments in the entirety of Pennsylvania. I joined the callback lists for Delaware County and several local pharmacies. To date, most of them still never called us back.
This is a common experience for people living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, specifically the “collar counties” of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties. At the end of February, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported a huge disparity in vaccine allotment between the collar counties and other far less populated counties. Delaware County, my home county, is the fifth largest in the state with over half a million residents. However, it ranked 53rd out of the 66 counties under PA Department of Health jurisdiction for vaccine distribution, with only 9,113 doses received per 100,000 people. Montour County, on the other hand, is the 62nd most populous county with only 18,230 residents. Yet it had the highest dose rate in the state with 164,153 doses per 100,000 residents. That’s right; they literally had more vaccines than people.
How could a region with a combined population of 2.5 million, comprising a fifth of the state’s residents, have so few vaccines? I spoke with Jennifer O’Mara, State Representative, chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus’ Southeast delegation and WCU alum. She told me that the collar counties were dealing with a low supply from the federal government, and demand was high in this densely-populated area: 40% of Delaware County residents qualified for the vaccine under Phase 1A.
Furthermore, the counties didn’t have the authority to make decisions about vaccine distribution. Although all four counties had emergency plans already in place, they haven’t had the power to activate them. As the Inquirer’s Maria Panaritis explains, “For [vaccination] plans to work as designed, the state would have had to push vaccine to counties directly, and then let the counties redistribute them to other providers. Counties, in turn, would have pushed the vaccine into people’s arms where they live: with sites at elementary, middle and high schools, at community colleges, hospitals and through employers of large workforces.” However, the state chose to send the vaccines to individual providers, rather than let county officials determine the best way to distribute them.
This has led to a serious underutilization of local resources. Janet Panning, interim health director of Montgomery County, told Action News late last month, “I believe we have the capacity to vaccinate 12,000 a day, or we will, once we have all those sites set up.” However, Montgomery County was only receiving 5,850 doses a week at the time. This is baffling for the third-largest county in Pennsylvania, with a population of over 830,000.
A dire situation was made worse when the state announced plans to distribute Johnson & Johnson vaccines exclusively through a single mass vaccination site for the entire Southeast region. After receiving much backlash, Gov. Wolf announced that they would open two sites in the collar counties, a region of over 2,000 square miles. Local leaders were still unsatisfied with this decision. Rep. O’Mara told me she feared that “adding new mass vaccination sites would further confuse Pennsylvanians,” who would have to deal with another “convoluted” registration system and potentially have to travel far distances to receive the vaccine. To counter this, the PA House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill opposing the state’s plan. As per the Inquirer, “The bill would require the Department of Health to detail plans for providing ‘sufficient doses’ of vaccine to counties that have requested more doses, as the city’s collar counties have done. And it would kill the state’s plan to set up two Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency mass vaccination clinics in the Southeast, instead allowing county health departments to distribute the shots.”
Though there was serious doubt that Gov. Wolf would sign off on the bill, it turned out that he didn’t have to. On March 31, the PA Health Department announced their intentions to scrap the mass vaccination sites in the region and instead give the Johnson & Johnson vaccines directly to the counties. WHYY reports that “the four collar counties are now expecting a flood of 42,000 new Johnson & Johnson vaccines a week in the near future.”
However, the FDA and CDC recommended a nationwide pause on distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine last week due to six recipients developing blood clots after being inoculated. In the collar counties, this led to the cancellation of countless appointments and the newly-allocated vaccines left unadministered. The counties have each made efforts to change course: Chester County has switched over to Pfizer and Moderna exclusively, Delaware County officials have requested a larger shipment of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and some clinics in Montgomery and Bucks counties have had to close temporarily, according to Action News.
When asked about the halt, Rep. O’Mara said, “I hope that people realize that the pause is just a pause.” She is worried that fear surrounding the pause will lead to vaccine hesitancy, and wants to assure residents that the risk of developing a blood clot is extremely rare: it has only happened in six cases out of over 6 million nationwide. That being said, she is not concerned that the pause will have a drastic effect on vaccine distribution in the region. The collar counties only began receiving Johnson & Johnson vaccines this month, and they were not very far into distribution. The pause has not affected the allocation of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, and O’Mara hopes she is able to secure more doses for Delaware County.
Last Tuesday, Pennsylvania expanded vaccine eligibility to all residents ages 16 and older, six days earlier than previously announced. O’Mara said that this expanded eligibility “is only a plus,” as it allows more people to get vaccinated. She told me that the county has improved its process and opens up new appointments every few days; 3,000 appointments were made available last Thursday. She also recalled that her office used to receive dozens of calls a day from constituents worried about securing a vaccine but now only receives one or two a week. She believes that the situation will continue to improve over time with an increased supply and more people getting vaccinated: “The demand will go down, and the supply will be able to keep up.”
My mother was finally able to receive her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine through Main Line Health, a regional healthcare provider. She will be receiving her second shot on April 29.
Shannon Montgomery is a fourth-year English major with minors in Creative Writing and Women’s & Gender Studies. SM916394@wcupa.edu