Who’s Really Getting Vaccinated?
Yesterday, I was surprised when a patent told me she was scheduled for the coronavirus vaccine. She is a healthy 58-year-old lawyer who has been working 100% remotely, but because she works for the New York State court system, she was chosen to be vaccinated.
Next patient told me his wife works at a hospital and got vaccinated there. “Oh, is she a nurse?” I naively asked. “No. She is the office manager in the billing department.”
This morning, I stopped at the deli to get coffee and the young owner told me he was scheduled for the shot. His wife had spent hours on the computer scheduling the entire family.
Meanwhile, I can’t get vaccines to give my patients. The State has absolute control over vaccine distribution and has set up a number of favored groups who will get preference. Despite their lip service to equitable distribution, New York’s process favors those with connections to the State or those with good computer skills who have the time to spend hours entering data, clicking and refreshing. The quest for government-enforced vaccine equity has led to inequity.
It would be much simpler and more patient-friendly to send the vaccines to primary care offices. It is easy for us to query our patient rosters and place telephone calls to the patients who are at most risk of COVID. I figure I could vaccinate 200 patients in a week without breaking a sweat. Since there are 200,000 practicing primary care physicians in the USA, we have the capacity to vaccinate 40 million people in a week just using primary care offices.
I’m not sure why primary care physicians have the lowest priority to get vaccine shipments. But, one thing I can tell you is New York State doesn’t trust us. I routinely receive threatening letters from the Department of Health warning me not to deviate from the State’s directives, and I haven’t even gotten any vaccine yet. It wasn’t enough to sign one Memorandum of Understanding, they had to quickly send an addendum just so they would have my written acknowledgment of their threat of “civil penalties, including but not limited to suspension or revocation of licensure or operating certificate, and may include also referral to any appropriate law enforcement entity.
I can see why other independent primary care physicians have decided not to bother giving vaccinations. When you are threatened with a million-dollar fine for vaccinating the wrong person and a hundred thousand dollar fine for not vaccinating people quickly enough, maybe the prudent thing is to not bother.
It’s a mystery to me why primary care doctors got cut out of the whole first wave. It’s not like we don’t have refrigerators adequate for the Moderna vaccine and don’t vaccinate our patients for flu. Every single year. That being said, I suspect in the states that feel compelled to threaten folks for real or imagined deviations from protocol a lot of primary care doctors will decide just that. Not to bother.
The harsh penalties over vaccine “violations” of state whims, is not new.
Well over a decade ago, when there was a shortage of flu vaccine, states had this priority list of who should be prioritized for vaccination. Fair enough for the suggestion. But my state went beyone suggestion, to make vaccinating someone not on the priority list a license discipline matter. Massachusetts threatened JAIL.
I would not care to be imprisoned for Felony Flu Shot. I would not care to have to defend my decision to vaccinate someone who wants it. So many of my patients historically refused flu shots.
Given the pharmacies have taken over all the vaccines that either pay well or are otherwise easier, leaving the problems to toe docs, I have chosen to get out of the vaccine business completely.
My guess is that under Biden you will see an increased use of private clinicians as the vaccines are approved that do not require the temperatures and equipment that the first two did. How would a private office keep the original two cold enough?
The next two, when approved will be easier to work with.
The Moderna vaccine is stable for 28 days at normal fridge temp. (2 to 8 C) and 6 months at normal freezer temp (-15 to -20C).
In my area, all the government officials were done first. I don’t see them listed in the 1a or 1b. But around here they were done before me. What is up with that?
“The State has absolute control over vaccine distribution and has set up a number of favored groups who will get preference. Despite their lip service to equitable distribution, New York’s process favors those with connections to the State or those with good computer skills who have the time to spend hours entering data, clicking and refreshing”
The well connected always have and probably always will get the good stuff first. Just don’t be the first one to stop clapping for Uncle Joe.
Great piece. All it took was another big wave of fear to give these morons more power to do this kind of crap.
“I’m not sure why primary care physicians have the lowest priority to get vaccine shipments.” Let me offer the suggestion that it is that they are uncontrolled human adults acting on the premise that they are especially qualified to administer and decide who should receive these vaccines.
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville : Chapter VI: What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear.
Actually, it’s been all over for a long time.One of the great fears is that DOCTORS, who give dangerous medicines in the treatment of dangerous illness, or cut open the living body, cannot be trusted with vaccination material, lest they dabble in black-market subterfuge, claiming that they INDIVIDUALLY are deciding WHOM might benefit the most from receiving vaccination. By now, we know that the individual is irredeemably corrupt, and only the State can be trusted to decide nobly – which de Tocqueville insolently called subjugation, surrender and slavery.
About three weeks ago, the Great American Panty Raid by the idiot fraternity that constitutes the bulk of American voters. A mob attacked a cenotaph, a memorial building which symbolizes government, but has handed off the details of governance many years ago. Some expressed themselves by pooping in Statuary Hall. Many infantilized citizens were there just to join the mob to “stretch itself at the feet of a single master,” the Leader who has been irritated that the few exercises of representative democracy seemed to imply that he was not sufficiently beloved.
Some in the mob believed in magic, tha the throttling of the Vice President would bring representative democracy to a screeching halt, and there would be nobody to tell us what to do but the Leader.
What does this have to do with COVID-19 vaccination? Everything. We trust that COVID-19 vaccination rules spring from the head of the Wise, that scientific intelligence can only be understood and enacted by institutions, not the pathetic individuals who make decisions without instruction, mere hairless hall-pooping bipeds who break into the Capital not to demand that its government retreat to its proper role, but rather to implead that Big Poppa remain to show us the way.
Our institution, a hub-and-spoke structure, decided that the spokes were too lacking in common sense to administer the vaccine, which requires dry ice (that is for sale in Wal-Mart). They also decided that the doctors in the “spokes” should not come in to the hub to receive vaccination, due to continuing emergency critical needs. The doctors – such as me – were told to go try to find the vaccine on their own. Our Department of Health caught me up in the top tier, which includes practicing physicians, and elderly IV heroin abusers. I had my shot at the kind dispensation of the State this week, and will return to the State’s vaccination facility (which is a pro basketball arena) in two weeks.
We deserve no better.
It seems devTocqueville described the perils of mandated masking perfectly. Whatever your disdain for the ‘Leader’, his biggest mistake was allowing manufactured fear in small things to justify the widespread “irregularities” that handed crushing force to the authoritarians. Fear is their preferred weapon, and no, we deserve no better. The medical community deserves special condemnation for serving as the authoritarians’ handmaidens, while accepting the fashionable label of “heroes” from a cowardly public.
If the medical professionals at the CDC had been allowed to set mandatory national standards for vaccination instead of leaving it to each state, then the lawyers and politicians of NY (and every other state) wouldn’t have been able to create standards that make sure that all of the politicians and lawyers get vaccinated first.
With all the other political BS going on with this disease it’s a damn shame the vaccine is politicized as well. This country is in deep doo- doo.