Coronavirus / USA-New York and Florida deplore slow vaccinations

by Carl O’Donnell and Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK, Jan.5 (Reuters) – More than two-thirds of the 15 million doses of coronavirus vaccine delivered to the United States have yet to be used, health officials said on Monday, as states in New York and Florida have said they want to penalize hospitals deemed too slow in vaccinations.

The governor of New York State has said hospitals must administer vaccines within a week of receiving them or face fines or fewer doses of the vaccine at a later date. Andrew Cuomo made the statement hours before announcing that a first case of the coronavirus variant has been detected in the state.

“I don’t want the vaccine to stay in a fridge or freezer, I want it to go into someone’s arm,” he said. “If you do not fulfill this task, it raises questions about the operational efficiency of the hospital.”

According to Andrew Cuomo, hospitals in New York have generally administered less than half of the doses of vaccine that were allocated to them, with however disparities from one hospital to another, he said.

In Florida, where priority has been given to the elderly, Governor Ron DeSantis announced a measure providing that additional doses of vaccine would be allocated to hospitals that administer the vaccine more quickly.

“Hospitals that are not doing a good job of deploying the vaccine will see their quota be transferred to hospitals that are doing a good job of deploying the vaccine,” he said at a press briefing.

Ron DeSantis has also indicated that a thousand additional nurses will be deployed in the state to administer the vaccine and help keep vaccination centers open seven days a week.

American medical experts fear the arrival of the more contagious coronavirus variant will accelerate an epidemic that has already infected more than 20 million people and caused more than 350,000 deaths in the country.

While the reluctance of part of the population towards COVID-19 vaccines – in particular because of their very rapid development – may explain the slowness of vaccinations, some American representatives point to logistical flaws while this is the most ambitious health campaign in the country’s history.

According to data released Monday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal government has distributed more than 15 million doses of the vaccine across the country but only about 4.5 million have been administered to date. present.

The administration’s initial goal was to have 20 million people vaccinated by the end of 2020 (Jonathan Allen, Carl O’Donnell, Rebecca Spaulding and Peter Szekely New York; French version Jean Terzian)

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