Sedgwick County asks state for permission to give very sick people COVID vaccines
Sedgwick County is asking the governor for latitude to give COVID-19 vaccinations to people with serious medical conditions, even if they don’t meet state age guidelines limiting the shots to those 65 and older.
The County Commission on Wednesday approved sending a written request to Gov. Laura Kelly and her health secretary, Dr. Lee Norman, asking them to allow vaccinations of people in frail health who’d be at serious risk of dying if they catch the coronavirus.
Kelly was noncommittal during her weekly Wednesday news conference.
“I know there’s been some negotiations going on,” she said. “I’m really going to have to leave it up to KDHE (Kansas Department of Health and Environment) to make those kinds of calls.”
People with certain cancers or heart, kidney, liver and pulmonary disease are “probably at the highest risk of having a bad outcome from this infection,” said Dr. Garold Minns, county health officer and the dean of the University of Kansas Medical School, Wichita.
But those patients, if they’re under 65, fall in the state’s Phase Three of vaccine distribution priority.
The county is in Phase Two at present and there are tens of thousands of people who will have to be vaccinated before the county can move to the next phase, Minns said.
Minns said he was told by KDHE officials that If the county moves the sick people up a phase, it risks losing vaccine supplies.
“It is not up to the county to move people around, and as a matter of fact if they start vaccinating people in Phase Three, then the state may say, ‘Well, I guess you have enough vaccine. We’re going to shift that over to counties in Phase Two,’” Minns said.
The effort to move the very sick to the front of the line was spearheaded by commissioners David Dennis and Jim Howell.
Dennis said he wanted to “move them up to whatever phase we’re in and keep them there.”
Howell added that “if they (state officials) want to punish us for caring about this population, I find that very, very upsetting.”
Minns said he’s heard from numerous physicians who want to vaccinate their most frail patients.
To prevent excessive and unjustified line-jumping, the county could require the doctors to provide written prescriptions and/or a letter describing the patient’s condition before giving them the shot, he said.
In the early rollout of the COVID vaccine, Sedgwick County limited the jabs to healthcare workers and the general population by age. They’ve gradually worked down from 90 and older to 65 and above.
The county has also opened vaccination to K-12 school teachers and staff, at the governor’s direction.
Within the next several weeks, the county Health Department plans to rapidly expand its COVID vaccine program to workers, a measure aimed at improving the economy.
As the county plows through the rest of Phase Two, it will prioritize the following groups in three sub-phases:
▪ Group 2A: aviation and manufacturing workers (30,000), public-safety officials (3,500), childcare workers (1,700), meat-packing-plant workers (1,135), transportation workers (1,000), veterinarians (100) and 4,000 workers in not-fully-defined “congregate settings.”
▪ Group 2B: postal service and department of motor vehicles workers (2,000), college and university staff (4,400), and clergy (1,100).
▪ Group 2C: retail and sales workers (30,000), grocery store and restaurant workers (28,000) and agricultural workers (750).
About 4% of Sedgwick County’s adult population had been fully vaccinated by the county Health Department as of Wednesday.
Nearly 50,000 total doses have been administered by Sedgwick County, which has 385,000 people eligible to receive the vaccine.
Contributing: Katie Bernard of the Eagle Topeka bureau
This story was originally published March 3, 2021 at 4:46 PM.
