I have some questions for anyone of knowledge or power. Greg Abbott, feel free to chime in. What happened to priority for Covid vaccines? Why haven't some people in nursing homes or people over 80 not been able to get a vaccine, but younger and less at risk of death from Covid people been given one? I know someone over 80 who was told by the Health Center this week that there won't be any more vaccines available until next month, yet much younger people are getting vaccines. Who is in charge of ensuring people in nursing homes and those over 80 get some priority over those less at risk? Last question. What's the deal with these drive through vaccine centers? Aren't people supposed to be monitored 15 to 20 minutes after the shot and in a place where immediate care can be given if there is a severe reaction? I can't imagine the highest risk people just driving off after the shot and hoping they don't have a reaction. Is that what's happening? It would seem like they would be given them in a hospital or place with doctors and equipment if needed in that type situation.
My understanding is that after receiving a shot, people are monitored in their car for 15 min in case of a reaction. They aren't just literally driving away afterwards. Elderly are being prioritized after healthcare workers as part of the 1A and 1B phases. It's mixed right now because the 1A group isn't signing up for vaccines so some places are opening up to 1B to get the vaccine out. The biggest issue is limited supply and the 1B group is so large that the elderly have a hard time getting appointment.
But some of the no mask GOP leaders in allowing this pandemic to spread made sure they got their vaccines first. Despicables!
Another big issue is that the private hospitals are only providing vaccinations for their customers...I mean patients. My sister's father in-law, who is over 65, scheduled an appointment with Memorial Hermann only to get turned away upon arrival because he was not a "patient" of MH. He told them he checked-into Memorial Hermann on an emergency check last year but was told he needed to have a primary physician with them.
Yeah, I agree, that just highlights more of the inequality in our society. Well if it comfort anyone, with feds now opening up supply by not saving 2nd doses, you'll see vaccinations pick up from City of Houston and Harris County locations. Just crossing fingers that the manufacturing process is stable and ramp up as well to meet the soon demand for the 2nd doses.
I don't work for MH but I do work for a different healthcare institution. This likely happened because they need an MR#/Patient ID for all who receive the vaccine so they can record and track everything. This is why my employer is not giving the vaccine to employees' family members - or at least, that's what they're telling us.
Those getting it through COH are filling out ImmTrac forms which I assume will get recorded appropriately if that is what you are referring to. Pure conjecture on my part but think it has to do with being able to charge their patient’s insurance for the visit. I understand it’s private but don’t like the fact that they are being provided with large allotments of the vaccine but placing additional restrictions on who gets it contrary to CDC guidelines. Edit: Should note that both administrations agree since it was recently announced they’ll also be shifting away from private hospital focus to pharmacies and large venue events.
Does anybody know any resources where I can get my 1B eligible parents vaccinated? The links on the Texas DHS website are pretty much useless. Their primary care physicians are with small groups so they are not getting a supply. They were scheduled to get it on Jan 8 - a medical company was contracted with the building they live in to receive the vaccines on site, but apparently the company was blocked from getting their expected supply. I just want to get them vaccinated, they are the only high risk loved ones I see regularly that really need it.
My family had the most luck going through COH but it is just a matter of hearing of openings and getting in before the site inevitably crashes or they run out. https://houstonemergency.org/covid-19-vaccines/
Are you in Houston? The best bet would be constantly monitor the three main vaccination hubs site - City of Houston Emergency - Harris Health - Houston Methodist Hospital Houston Methodist vaccination was open to the public (non HMH patients) 1B earlier this week, but all of the appointment filled out within an hour. Rather than monitoring the pages manually, I'd use a web change notification service to check each site every few minutes. The service would the notify you when there has been a change on the website. It might cost a few dollars for the service. example: https://visualping.io/, https://www.wachete.com/, if you have a computer that's on all day, then you can install a chrome extension to do the same thing for free https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/distill-web-monitor/inlikjemeeknofckkjolnjbpehgadgge Otherwise, use the DSHS vaccination map. Click around until you find one says that it has vaccines and that it was updated very recently. Maybe filter by showing only pharmacy to ensure that they're not only vaccinating patients in their network. For example, I see a Kroger Pharmacy in Clear Lake 16400 El Camino Real, Houston, TX showing 10 Moderna available as of 1/15/21 10am. You will have to call around a lot but at least it's a starting point. Good luck.
If you can hit one of the hubs websites within ~30 minutes of them opening up slots, you can get one...but its luck of the draw. The DSHS vaccination map is almost useless. You can bother the locations with "first dose available" but the map is not kept up to date and relies on each location submitting updates, so they are always spoken for. The head of the Methodist system was on the news yesterday and he said that he thinks they'll be ramped up in 2 weeks to get anybody in 1A or 1B in that wants one pretty easily. Going through your primary care provider is a good shot too.
The state went from allocating vaccines to providers to wanting giant distribution centers last week. Total cluster**** so far. Thanks, Abbot.
Just a word of warning, but it seems like people are using scripts to ping our site (the one linked Harris Health above) and took down our site yesterday for a couple of hours. Need to see if it was a DoS or just many people trying to get a vaccine. We will be blocking IPs if you ping our site too aggressively. If reports that the feds actually don't have any more supply and there is no reserve for 2nd doses, that really messes with our distribution plans as well. A lot was banking on a steady increase in supply.... Before anyone asks, I won't be giving any details when registrations open. I like my job
Good to know! What would be be considered 'too aggressively'? Will a check every minute, 15 minutes, or 30 minutes trigger the block? I'm also hoping the news of the lack of reserve thing doesn't drastically impact vaccination. My parents are scheduled for 1/22 through City of Houston Emegency and I hope it won't get pushed back.
I pointed out on this forum last month that the roll out was going to be a complete disaster. I’m sure many others knew the same thing. CDC recommendations are just recommendations. Hospitals and providers that get a supply of the vaccine can do anything they want with the vaccine. Some follow CDC recommendations and some do not. If you have a doctor that is connected to one of the major hospital groups, then you have a better chance to get the vaccine sooner rather than later. Most of the major hospitals are using CDC recommendations. But, we were never going to get all the most vulnerable people vaccinated by the end of January. It’s going to take at least several more months just to get people over 65 vaccinated. What is frustrating for most people is that there is no organized and fair process to get people vaccinated. We had 10 months to figure this out and we did practically nothing. Right now there is very limited availability of vaccine and millions who want it. It will probably be well into the summer before some can get the shot. Currently you have to be lucky or know someone on the inside to get the vaccine. Biden says he wants to give 100 million shots in his first 100 days in office. That’s disappointing in my opinion. If each person needs two shots, that’s only 50 million people with 95% immunity by the end of April. Even if the supply increases by large amounts, it will take a long time to get it into people’s arm.
I work for a healthcare company and a bunch of my a-hole coworkers who have no direct patient contact got the vaccine through our doctor who never rounds. Some of idiots work from home and had the audacity to get the shot.
I don't think things are as bad as you are seeing them. We just did 1.13 million doses administered for the 1/15 update which is the 1st day over 1 million doses. The 7 day average has been ramping up quickly. It has nearly doubled in the past week from 420k to 798k. The UK is outpacing us in vaccinations per 100 people, but they also took a different route that the CDC did not recommend. With that we are still far ahead of the EU and Canada. Texas also leads the way in the US with 1 million people having at least 1 dose administered. That said the doses of vaccine delivered seems to have slowed over the past week, but we still have plenty in reserve that need to be used. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations Also, the J&J data looks promising and they are expecting deliveries to start ramping up significantly by mid-March assuming all goes as planned. Spoiler https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034201 RESULTS After the administration of the first vaccine dose in 805 participants in cohorts 1 and 3 and after the second dose in cohort 1, the most frequent solicited adverse events were fatigue, headache, myalgia, and injection-site pain. The most frequent systemic adverse event was fever. Systemic adverse events were less common in cohort 3 than in cohort 1 and in those who received the low vaccine dose than in those who received the high dose. Reactogenicity was lower after the second dose. Neutralizing-antibody titers against wild-type virus were detected in 90% or more of all participants on day 29 after the first vaccine dose (geometric mean titer [GMT], 224 to 354) and reached 100% by day 57 with a further increase in titers (GMT, 288 to 488), regardless of vaccine dose or age group. Titers remained stable until at least day 71. A second dose provided an increase in the titer by a factor of 2.6 to 2.9 (GMT, 827 to 1266). Spike-binding antibody responses were similar to neutralizing-antibody responses. On day 14, CD4+ T-cell responses were detected in 76 to 83% of the participants in cohort 1 and in 60 to 67% of those in cohort 3, with a clear skewing toward type 1 helper T cells. CD8+ T-cell responses were robust overall but lower in cohort 3. I know they recently Dr. Slaoui said J&J won't meet their target of 60 million doses delivered by the end of April and 100 million by the end of June. Spoiler "But at a Tuesday news conference, Dr. Slaoui said that instead of 12 million doses envisioned in the contract by the end of February, the company was likely to have in the “single-digit” millions. He also said the company was “trying to make that number get as close to a double-digit number as possible, and then a larger number in March and a much larger number in April.” Another person familiar with the company’s progress said it was poised to deliver only perhaps three million or four million doses of its vaccine by the end of next month. In a statement, a Johnson & Johnson spokesman said, “We are confident we can meet our contractual obligations to supply our vaccine candidate to the U.S. government.” So we will see who is right, but either way it sounds like at least 30-40 million will be available from J&J by the end of April https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/health/covid-vaccine-johnson-johnson.html However, if the Oxford vaccine is approved for use by late Jan or early Feb then combined with the other 3 should be enough to cover all high risk people that are willing to take a vaccine. Before their testing hiccups they were planned to be the backbone of the US vaccine portfolio. They should still be able to provide at least 100 million doses to us relatively rapidly. We have to remember there are only 170 million people over 35 (35 and older accounts for 99% of all covid deaths) in the US and roughly 25% of the US is under 18 and isn't even able to take any vaccine yet. All this said I would expect the large majority of that group to be vaccinated or at least have to ability to be vaccinated before summer.
Wife got the second Pfizer shot yesterday (she is a physician...I can’t get one), and fortunately she only had a bad headache for an hour or so in the middle of the night as other coworkers complained of really bad chills at night. the rollout has been a disaster so far, my 74 year old mother has been on a list 3x now for the first shot, only to be told each time that her grouping has changed and that she has to re-register yet again. I was hopeful based on feedback from my wife that I would be getting the shot by March but not looking good for us non-seniors as they have been so slow and inefficient locally so far.
lots of details there but it’s simple why there are so much frustration.. 1- the demand is much greater than the supply 2- the supply did not go out smoothly, in time, in quantity as promised 3- extremely poor communication and complete lack of accurate messaging and timeline at the federal level to state and to individual it’s going to get better
