For at least six months we’ve known that a vaccine was coming. It would have been easy – yes, easy – to build a simple system that people could understand for making appointments to get the vaccine.
That wasn’t done, so the predictable mess has ensued.
And the priorities by which people are getting the vaccine continues to make little sense.
Trying to make a reservation for those now eligible for the vaccine – people 65 and over and certain essential employees – is a frustrating waste of time, unless perhaps you have clout.
Go to our site to make a reservation, the Illinois Department of Public Health says routinely. Try it. It doesn’t work. It’s worthless. And don’t try the virtual assistant, which seems to be some kind of cruel joke.
Or do it through the private sector providers like CVS, Walgreens, Jewel-Osco and others, IDHP and local officials say. Sorry, they don’t work, either.
Not only are registrations unavailable but there is no system to notify you when openings arise.
And so we have hundreds of thousands of senior Illinoisans wasting countless hours on nothing, and no system to push a notification on availability to them.
The stories from those frustrated are consistent in the press and in emails we have received. Some were printed in the Chicago Tribune Wednesday.
Some of the frustrated are over 90-years old with preconditions and unable to get any help. Some may be lucky enough to have a relative but they can’t usually help, either. My colleague, Ted Dabrowski, spent time trying to schedule his 81-year old mother. No luck.
And even if you are lucky enough to get the vaccine you may be frustrated trying to get the needed second booster. As one man in that situation told ABC Chicago, “They have to have a system where if you get the first shot, you can get the second shot because otherwise where are we? And, it’s probably only going to get worse as more and more people do get their first dose.”
That person also stated what’s most important: “This can be solved with a database, callback system, automated, on the web, make the websites better. These are all doable.”
He’s right. It would not have been difficult at all for even a small, moderately skilled group of web and computer folks to build such a system in very short order. It should have been done months ago.
Who is to blame?
It appears there is plenty of blame to go around – federal, state and local governments as well as the private sector providers who were contracted by the federal government. Some of the finger pointing is discussed here by WGLT.
Unquestionably, however, the state should have ensured that a reliable system was tested and ready long ago.
We fully understand and accept that Illinois is at the mercy of how many vaccines it gets, and that the state does not yet have enough to cover nearly the entire population of eligible Phase 1B recipients. But this is about the procedure for scheduling them.
A separate matter is why so many elderly in long-term care remain unvaccinated. They account for half of Illinois’ COVID deaths and were supposed to be included in the first group vaccinated, Phase 1A.
But four weeks into vaccinations at Illinois nursing homes, nearly 80% of the doses for the campaign are still waiting to be used, according to WBEZ. Illinois has just 1,200 LTC facilities with about 100,000 residents, according to IDHP, and the state or its providers did receive the vaccine for all of them.
Vaccinating that group should not be such a heavy lift, wrote WBEZ, citing Dr. Ronald Hershow, who directs epidemiology and biostatistics in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health. Gov. JB Pritzker and the private sector providers are pointing fingers at each other over that, too. If there is any excuse for not having them vaccinated it is unknown to us.
The bottom line on this discussion so far is to look at how many vaccines Illinois has administered compared to how many have been distributed to it, and that number is not good. Only 47.6% of the vaccines Illinois has received have been administered as of January 27, ranking it number 43 in the nation.
And we we continue to see little sense in who is getting the vaccinations — the priority rules used not just in Illinois but many other states. “(U)sing logic that would put “Alice in Wonderland’s” Mad Hatter to shame, the new vaccines have been more frequently administered first to healthier, younger people instead of those at risk to die.” That’s from a Wednesday column in RealClear by Scott W. Atlas, MD, the former White House advisor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Specifically, it’s only those about age 60 and older who face any material risk, plus a small number of others with certain comorbidities. Yet “essential workers” are taking up much of the vaccine allotments no matter what their age. Also getting priority are healthcare professionals working from home on computers.
You have to wonder if clout doesn’t have something to do with how public workers are getting the vaccine. That includes Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who got it recently. At age 58 and healthy as far as we know, as an “essential worker” she is in the same 1B category as everybody 65 and older. How was she able to get a shot while so many others have been frustrated? Did she spend hours online like everybody else and luck out?
And why does vaccination policy entirely ignore the reality that millions of Illinoisans are already immune because they were already infected? Yet another study published recently confirms that immunity (two of the earlier studies are described here). Over half of Illinois’ population has already acquired immunity based on CDC numbers.
Young, healthy individuals who have already acquired immunity should, at a minimum, be discouraged from getting the vaccine until those at risk are vaccinated. They “should not be immediate priorities,” wrote Atlas in that RealClear article, and he added that their immunity is “not even acknowledged.”
We, too, have been frustrated with how that matter has been ignored.
Add it to the list of frustrations and unanswered questions.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
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