Tag: centers

About twenty years working on computers. A young researcher studying cancer. Technicians from basic research laboratories.

These are just a few of the thousands of people who have been immunized against the coronavirus at hospitals affiliated with Columbia University, New York University, Harvard and Vanderbilt, even as millions of frontline workers and older Americans are waiting their turn.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued recommendations to ensure the country’s vaccines reach people most at risk first: health workers who interact with Covid-19 patients, residents and staff. nursing homes, followed by 75-year-olds and older workers and some essential workers.

Each state has established its own version of the guidelines, but with the deployment at an icy pace, the pressure has grown for a more flexible approach. Officials at the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration recently suggested that it might be wiser to simply relax the criteria and distribute the vaccine as widely as possible.

Yet those officials did not envision that vaccines would be given to healthy people between the ages of 20 and 30 before the elderly, essential workers or others at high risk. States should always prioritize groups that “make sense,” FDA commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn told reporters on Friday.

But a handful of the country’s most prestigious teaching hospitals have already taken the notion much further. Workers who have nothing to do with patient care and who are not 75 years of age or older have been offered the vaccines. Some of the institutions were among the earliest beneficiaries of limited supplies in the United States.

“Cronyism and relationships have no place in the deployment of this vaccine,” said Ruth Faden, bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “If we don’t do this right the consequences could be pretty dire, so it’s really essential that people are hypersensitive to the rules of the game here.”

The CDC never intended to include workers who do not interact with patients, such as administrators and graduate students, in the first tier of priority vaccinations, said Dr Stanley Perlman, immunologist at the University of Iowa and member of the committee that issued the recommendations.

“It has all become so confusing,” he says. “In retrospect, I think we probably needed to be a little more specific about what we thought, because we never thought about the hospital administrators.

In Nashville, Vanderbilt University Medical Center has asked all staff, whether or not caring for patients, to sign up for the vaccination. Vaccinations began in December, when the Tennessee Hospital Association authorized vaccination for all hospital workers, regardless of their role.

On January 6, the medical center announced plans to begin vaccinating its high-risk patients, but only after “administering the initial dose of vaccine to more than 15,000 people working at the medical center,” according to an email. ‘he sent his patients.

“We continue to follow the advice we receive from the Tennessee Department of Health as we immunize staff at Vanderbilt Health and other priority groups of patients, staff and community health workers,” John Howser, director communications from the medical center, said in a statement.

But the Tennessee Department of Health sees it differently. “Hospitals have been encouraged from the start of the integration process to use any remaining vaccine to immunize high priority populations,” said Bill Christian, a spokesperson for the department.

“Some hospitals have interpreted their ‘staff’ broadly,” he added.

The Tennessee Department, he said, “continues to applaud hospitals that have prioritized only their high-risk frontline staff for immunization and made any remaining immunizations available to help meet the needs of the community by vaccinating »high priority groups.

“I wish our elderly parents had received the vaccine before I did,” said a young Vanderbilt employee who has no contact with patients and asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal.

In Boston, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, both affiliated with Harvard University, have immunized more than 26,000 employees, including those involved in patient care, researchers who may come in contact with coronavirus samples and those engaged in clinical trials, according to Rich Copp, a spokesperson for hospitals.

The reason? Some lab scientists may be needed in hospitals as the coronavirus reappears. “Our first wave experience demonstrated that some members of the research community may need to be redeployed to support work in patient care settings with Covid,” said Copp.

Still, the medical centers have announced their intention to vaccinate the rest of their workers from Monday.

In New York State, only a fraction of the estimated 2.1 million frontline workers have been vaccinated. Governor Andrew Cuomo has threatened to impose fines of up to $ 100,000 on hospitals that do not vaccinate quickly enough to use their doses.

At Columbia University, the word quickly spread in research labs far removed from patient care: If you showed up at Millstein Hospital, the university’s main medical center, you could get the shot. – it doesn’t matter if your job had something to do with patients.

Graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and researchers were soon lining up at the hospital auditorium, according to several university employees. Almost everyone at a cancer research center affiliated with the hospital has received the vaccine.

Hospital officials said they eventually saw emails directing people to the auditorium, but anyone who did not need the vaccine was fired.

“We have worked to vaccinate tens of thousands of employees to date, starting with patient-contact staff, and we are constantly striving to improve our vaccination process,” said Kate Spaziani, vice president hospital communications.

She added, “We will continue to do this until everyone receives a vaccine. We follow all New York State Department of Health guidelines on vaccine priority. “

But some beneficiaries were upset to learn they did not qualify for state guidelines.

“I understand now that it was not our turn, and I feel bad about going out of my turn,” said a young researcher whose work has no impact on Covid-19. “I’m also frankly a little angry with the hospital and the university for not controlling it properly.”

At NYU’s Langone Medical Center, outreach to staff members who have no contact with patients was more deliberate.

“We are currently only offering the Covid-19 vaccine to frontline workers,” the centre’s website says. “We will send a message to our patients as soon as the vaccine is available to patients.”

But in an email to staff on December 28, Dr Anil Rustgi, dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine, said the center has completed vaccinating its 15,000 staff who interact with patients and would start immunizing all other staff. There was no mention of the elderly or other priority groups specified by New York State.

An email Tuesday to NYU Medical Center staff who had not yet registered for immunization said, “As an employee of a healthcare facility, you have the option of receiving a vaccine only. millions of people across the country want – and you can have it, now. “

In an unspoken admission that these employees would not otherwise be qualified for the vaccine so soon, the email warned that once the state expanded the eligibility criteria, “You may have to wait weeks. , even months, to receive it depending on demand and availability. “

State officials were dismayed that the NYU and Colombia opened up vaccines to low-risk staff before millions of state residents who needed vaccines.

New York on Friday expanded its immunization guidelines to include essential workers and people over 75.

Yet the guidelines “do not give carte blanche to vaccinate all employees of a hospital entity, regardless of their function,” said Gary Holmes, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health. “While we don’t know all of the facts here, as long as there is a violation the DOH will investigate.”

Privately, some state officials were furious. Rather, institutions should have asked the state what to do next as soon as they finished vaccinating frontline staff, an official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he did not was not allowed to discuss the matter.

“The only reason they have as many vaccines as they have is because they were the vaccine keepers – because they have cold rooms,” the official said. “This was not the NYU vaccine to use for NYU”

The problem is not limited to academic medical centers. Some hospitals have so few controls in place that many people have been able to bypass the line with false claims about vaccines.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, for example, an online form recommends that applicants use a personal email address, rather than a hospital-affiliated address, and does not require business identification numbers. employees.

“Yes, we want people to be vaccinated, but we need to make sure that high-risk groups have access to it,” said Saskia Popescu, hospital epidemiologist at the University of Arizona. The fact that the process is so disorganized “undermines confidence in the public health process, and I think it’s really heartbreaking.”

Several university workers, including a few who unknowingly accepted the vaccine offline, were also baffled by what they saw as an unfair and unfair process.

“It’s such a show of privilege, you know?” said a Columbia faculty member who did not receive the vaccine and asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal from administrators. “It’s because we’re at elite universities and medical centers.”