Health

Biden administration may want to get vaccine to states quicker

BOSTON — Reports coming out of the Biden administration are revealing a different plan of attack on releasing the COVID-19 vaccine. While the Trump administration’s strategy was to hold back half of the available vaccine production to ensure second doses are available, Biden’s camp appears to want to release almost all of it right away.

“Warp Speed got the vaccine to places that were delivered but did not get them from those files into people’s arms. And so it is a gigantic logistical concern of how we do that,” President-Elect Biden said. “I’m committed to getting 100 million shots in people’s arms.”

From the feds to the state to the first responders, Brewster Ambulance Service got the email Wednesday, the shipment Thursday, and began vaccinating Friday. While grateful, they say it was not nearly enough.

“We got two hundred doses out of I think it was 740 that that was put in there for the state,” said chief clinical officer Chris Dibona. “Quite frankly the way I see it even if it came by Uber or Lyft, let’s just get it.”

The slow rollout is the reason the Biden administration wants to Operation Warp Speed, sped up, getting the vaccines out of the federal government’s hands ASAP.

“The rollout has been a travesty,” Biden said. “We had 4,000 deaths yesterday and things continue to rise, to escalate. That’s my number one concern get the virus under control. We lost over 125,000 jobs. This last month.”

“We’ve heard the media reports of the incoming administration, and we look forward to hearing more about what President-Elect Biden’s, when he’s president, what the plans are for vaccines,” said Marylou Sudders, Secretary of Health and Human Services. “As we have said, vaccines can’t come soon enough into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

The goal for the Biden administration appears to be at least to remove one level of government. There may not be a right or wrong answer here, it’s not even a political issue as much, but just a different opinion on how to roll out vaccines.

“The faster we can start deploying the vaccine to everybody the better off,” said Domenic Corey, director of operations Brewster Ambulance Service. “Everyone’s going to be needing it, the entire population. So from my perspective, I think there’s a lot of pros to getting that vaccine out of there quickly, even getting those first doses out there quickly without necessarily keeping tight restraint on having that second round timed out to come in behind it. I do agree that there’s there are some logistical challenges that go into that with storage the freezer temperature is required to keep this safe and effective.”

“If you get a large amount of stock that you can’t properly manage handle and store in a rush fashion, there may be some waste,” said Dibona. “That that will happen. I think to minimize it, you give folks some steady diets as an introduction, maybe a little appetizer to it get used to it, and make sure there are no errors.”

The men say they had no idea the vaccines were coming this week, nonetheless, they were very grateful and so were their staff. One woman told the story of pulling over into a random grassy area just to schedule her vaccine appointment as soon as she found out it arrived.

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