Syracuse, N.Y. – New York’s rapidly expanding Covid-19 vaccine rollout was plagued this week by widespread confusion, enormous frustration, and calls to make the system fairer and easier to use.
Problems cascaded as the state expanded the eligible population to about 7 million people, while New York is getting only 300,000 doses of the vaccine each week. That number is likely to drop to 250,000, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday.
People desperate to get vaccinated struggled this week with websites that crashed and a phone line with wait times long enough to watch an entire Buffalo Bills game. Tens of thousands secured appointments at six yet-to-open vaccine sites, only to see those appointments canceled by the state Department of Health because the web link wasn’t supposed to be made public yet.
Kinney Drugs filled all 7,500 of its slots in five hours Monday; the chain’s website now begs people “NOT to call your local store.” The state health department announced Thursday all appointments are now booked through late April at state-run sites.
Healthy people in their 40s and 50s at relatively low risk got shots before many older people and high-risk professionals. State Sen. Joe Griffo, R-Rome, labeled the rollout “Darwinian” and called for the state to protect those most in need.
People getting their first dose were told to call to schedule the second, then told, no, wait, we’ll make your appointment for you. At week’s end, many people who got their first shots still didn’t know when they’d get the necessary booster doses. A Madison County clinic was canceled Tuesday when a shipment didn’t arrive; 300 people were turned away.
The state was caught flat-footed at the beginning of the pandemic in February, and here we are again, Griffo said.
“New York’s vaccine distribution process is disorderly, disjointed and in disarray,” said Griffo, who is asking the Senate and Assembly health committees to hold hearings. “You had an opportunity to plan logically for this. You should have been looking at what we could do to mitigate this.”
The one inescapable reality is there isn’t nearly enough vaccine supply to meet demand, and there are far more willing arms than vials of vaccine. Unless the state’s supply ramps up rapidly, it will take months just to inoculate those already eligible, and a year or more to vaccinate everybody in New York who wants one.
There’s a lot of criticism to this week’s expanded rollout, but the high demand for shots is also a positive sign, said Cynthia Anne Leifer, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell University. Last week, Leifer said, she worried there wouldn’t be enough vaccine sites or enough people eligible and willing to receive the shots. State and counties rose to meet those challenges, she said, and now have to deal with the opposite problem: too many people and not enough vaccine.
“Could we have predicted there would be bottlenecks? Sure,” Leifer said. “Could they have done a better job preparing? Yes. But we’re getting vaccines in people’s arms, so we’re moving in the right direction.”
New York has vaccinated about 645,000 people, according to the Johns Hopkins University. The state’s population is about 19 million.
And while some vaccine-seekers have reported error messages and long holds, some got their shots without a hitch. Greg Snyder, a police officer for the town of Manlius, snagged one of the first appointments at the state fairgrounds site, which opened Wednesday.
“It was pretty smooth,” Snyder said. “Signup was easy, and I was there 40 minutes, including the 15-minute wait time after the shot. It all ran well.”
There’s been no evidence that vaccines are going to waste; in fact, there are reports of vaccines getting used up quickly and even shortages. Onondaga County is dispensing its 3,600 weekly doses within two days, said county spokesman Justin Sayles. Hospitals in Central New York have used up all their vaccine, Cuomo said. The state Department of Health had to call and reschedule 300 people when supplies didn’t reach the Chittenango location soon enough.
The vaccine rollout began last month, with the first doses going to hospitals to immunize those who worked with Covid-19 patients. Then the vaccines were extended to a group called 1A, which included first responders, funeral home directors and others at high risk. Nursing home residents, who have suffered the heaviest toll of the pandemic, are being immunized under a separate program run by the federal government and pharmacies.
On Monday, New York opened eligibility to about 3 million people in what’s called the 1B group. That included everybody over 75, and at-risk professions like teaching, firefighting and law enforcement. Then, on Tuesday, the federal Health and Human Services Department said everybody 65 or older should get shots. New York went along.
“It takes a large group that can’t get the vaccine and makes an even larger group that can’t get the vaccine,” said Mark Monmonier, a Syracuse University professor who tried and failed to get appointments for him and his wife, both in their late 70s. “It just seems as if this whole thing was not well-thought-out.”
Some health experts also questioned the idea of expanding the pool when there wasn’t enough vaccine for those at the front lines. Giving the vaccine to 65-year-olds who are healthy and stay home before giving it to front-line workers skews the point of the vaccine program, said Brian Leydet, an epidemiologist at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
“You can’t get the high-risk folks vaccinated because they’re competing for vaccine spots with those at lower risk,” said Leydet, who runs the lab that processes saliva samples taken from staff and students at ESF and neighboring Syracuse University.
Griffo called on the state to impose more strict rules on who gets the shots right away and who has to wait longer. He’s not against the 1B and 65-plus expansions, but he says vaccines should be better targeted to those at greatest risk.
“I’m getting calls from people who are 80 and 85 years old, and they’re like, ‘How do I get this thing?’ ” he said, “while you see on social media people showing their vaccination cards, and they’re in their 30s and 40s.”
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set out two overarching guidelines for who should get the vaccine first: those most vulnerable, and those most needed to make society run. That first group initially included people 75 and older, and those in nursing homes. In the second are health care workers, EMTs, police, teachers and other front-line essential workers.
Older adults are at highest risk of severe complications and death from Covid-19. About two-third of deaths in Onondaga County occurred in nursing homes, for which the state does not report ages. Of the 314 county residents who died at home or in hospitals, 93% were at least 60 years old.
Older people – and the poor, another group hit disproportionately hard by the coronavirus – are also less likely to have the equipment or knowledge to spend hours online navigating the appointment system, said Syracuse University public health professor David Larsen.
“Those with the least means among us are the least likely to have support to help them sign up,” Larsen said. “Those are the challenges of public health, and we need to meet them.”
Scores of family members and friends and fellow churchgoers chipped in this week to get older people signed up. Getting an appointment involved a luck, persistence and enough technological savviness to navigate the jammed and sometimes confusing websites.
Aileen Gallagher, a professor at SU, tried unsuccessfully on her cell phone to make an appointment for her mother, 81. Gallagher was repeatedly kicked off the state’s mobile site, she said.
“Beyond just being hard to navigate, you couldn’t respond to all the information you needed to respond to,” Gallagher said. “Eventually I gave up and called my brother, who lives in Washington, D.C. He was able to get the appointment.”
To help the less tech-savvy, the state opened a telephone hotline Monday afternoon. It was immediately jammed. Tom Boll, who also teaches at SU, spent four hours on hold Monday night, eating dinner and watching the Bills game before discovering he’d been placed in the wrong hold line. Tuesday, Boll, 68, finally made his appointment online.
The overloaded systems were compared to other infamous site-crashing rollouts, like the Affordable Care Act and the state’s unemployment registration at the start of the pandemic.
Jennifer Boulanger, of Rome, spent hours playing what she called “beat the clock,” logging in over and over on the state website to line up a vaccination appointment.
“Why tell us that we are eligible before the state is ready to accommodate us?” she asked.
Boulanger finally got an appointment, only to have it canceled by the health department. She called the whole experience a “fiasco.”
Anger at the state’s rollout hit a fever pitch Thursday when the state abruptly canceled appointments for tens of thousands of people who, like Boulanger, had unknowingly used a link that wasn’t live yet. Despite that, they received confirmation notices on Department of Health letterhead with their appointment times confirmed.
On Thursday, the state emailed them all and said their appointments were “voided” and they had to get back in the 7-million-person line.
“It’s absolutely horrible,” said Heather Gordon, who had finally secured an appointment for her 71-year-old father, only to see it yanked away Thursday night. “He’s at high risk with several underlying medical conditions, and there are no appointments.”
The state health department has not responded to repeated requests for an explanation of what happened. The state’s information services department said someone had leaked an unauthorized link to six vaccination sites but offered no details.
Griffo said Friday the state should honor those appointments, saying people shouldn’t be penalized for the health department’s “misstep.”
On the Onondaga Nation, south of Syracuse, cases are increasing, and members are worried about the health of their elders, said nation attorney Joe Heath. So far, the nation has received only 100 doses, he said, and that’s not nearly enough for the hundreds more elders and those who care for them.
“In traditional indigenous cultures, the elders are their libraries, their universities, their wisdom,” Heath said. “We know that communities of color are being much more negatively impacted by the virus for a combination of reasons.”
Heath said everybody is waiting in line for the vaccines, and the state needs to do more to overcome the supply shortage and the myriad obstacles people face in getting the vaccines.
“There’s nowhere near enough vaccines in the pipeline, and the infrastructure to administer them is not meeting the needs,” he said. “Onondaga needs more vaccines, and we cannot get an answer as to when and where.”
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