Kansas health chief says we’re getting 1% of COVID vaccine and that’s what we deserve
One percent.
That’s the amount of the COVID-19 vaccine that’s been distributed to Kansas from the national supply chain run by the federal government, said Dr. Lee Norman, the secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
And that’s about what we should expect, Norman said Tuesday.
“Kansas has 3 million persons and the U.S. population’s about 330 (million),” he said. “Sometimes we get shorted a little bit depending on what’s coming through the supply chain, but then again, when we get shorted . . . other people are being shorted as well. I won’t say misery loves company.”
At times, the state has gotten only 50 percent of the doses promised a week before, he said.
“The problem is there’s not enough,” Norman said. “That’s been the problem we’re unable to slay.”
Confusion continues to swirl around COVID-19 vaccine distribution in Kansas and a meeting Tuesday of the two legislative health committees didn’t appear to help much.
House and Senate members rained questions on Norman, but left the meeting expressing frustration over the answers they got.
What is known at this point is that the department has received approximately 200,000 doses of vaccine and that 125,479 of those had found their way into people’s arms by Tuesday morning, Norman told the lawmakers in the joint meeting of the House and Senate health committees.
Norman said only eight of the doses were known to have been wasted because they expired before they could be administered.
Norman’s numbers represent only a partial count of doses received and administered, because there are several other paths by which the vaccine comes into Kansas.
Many of the lawmakers’ questions centered on dosages for residents of nursing homes, which KDHE doesn’t control because the vaccine comes straight from the federal government to two pharmacy chains, Walgreens and CVS, which are responsible for disbursing it to the homes.
“They’re the ones providing the vaccine to the long-term care facilities through contracts with the federal government,” Norman said. “We’re not in the middle of that.”
Two Senate Republicans, Beverly Gossage of Eudora and Carolyn McGinn of Sedgwick, complained that the system seems to have bypassed their elderly mothers.
“My mother has not been out of her facility since March,” Gossage said. “She’s 90 and is in an independent living facility, drives a car, but has not been offered the vaccine.”
Norman said that facility should be eligible for vaccinations via the Walgreens/CVS program, even though it’s not a nursing home, because the residents take their meals together and could spread COVID to each other.
McGinn said her mother, also 90, is also in an independent living facility with shared meals and many of the same health concerns associated with nursing homes. But the facility has apparently been bypassed for the vaccine because it’s private-pay and not under the federal Center for Medicaid Services.
“I’ve been told that Walgreens and CVS cannot go in that facility,” McGinn said. “They live in the same congregate setting as nursing homes and they do not get the shot.”
Norman said it shouldn’t matter whether the facility is regulated by CMS or not, and that it could be an “orphan” facility that does not contract with either CVS or Walgreens for drugs. In those cases, the state is responsible for supplying vaccine to whatever pharmacy they use.
“That is our obligation to make sure that those pharmacies that they contract with have the vaccine in order to give it,” he said.
Phil Griffin, deputy director of KDHE, said there are about 37 known orphan facilities in the state.
This story was originally published January 19, 2021 at 5:06 PM.
