A banner for vaccines is seen at a pharmacy on September 01, 2023 within the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn borough in Latest York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Weeks after the approval of updated Covid vaccines, community health centers across the country say they’re still waiting on their doses to reach. The delays are stopping many vulnerable adults and kids from getting vaccinated ahead of a possible winter wave.
Cahaba Medical Care, which has 26 community health clinics throughout Alabama, hasn’t received a single shipment of the recent Covid vaccines for the reason that rollout began in September, said Veronica Ford, a nursing manager at the middle.
“We are literally waiting with bated breath,” Ford said. “We’re checking day by day to see if the state has received their supply in order that we will get ours.”
The clinics, Ford said, treat many patients with underlying conditions that make them more liable to severe illness. She’s concerned that individuals who’ve already are available in to get their annual flu shot won’t return to get the Covid vaccine once the shipments are available in.
The shipment delays, experts say, underscore the enduring health disparities based on race and sophistication within the U.S.
Community health centers provide federally funded free or low-cost health services, making them pivotal in providing care to underserved populations, including individuals with low incomes, undocumented immigrants, and lots of Black and brown communities.
Since the clinics depend on federal funding, they can not afford to cover the prices of the vaccines on their very own. That wasn’t an issue through the pandemic, when the federal government was the one buying and distributing the doses; Ford said that Cahaba, for instance, gave about 50,000 Covid vaccinations throughout the pandemic that were supplied by the state and federal government.
Now that the federal government has largely stopped paying, many community health centers have needed to depend on programs including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bridge Access Program, which goals to supply free Covid vaccines to adults without insurance or with limited insurance coverage.
But shipments from that program are delayed, with community health centers facing weekslong wait times for his or her vaccine orders, in accordance with Vacheria Tutson, the associate vice chairman of policy and regulatory affairs on the National Association of Community Health Centers.
“I’ve had health centers who’ve only received 100 vaccines,” Tutson said.
With limited shots available, clinics have needed to prioritize doses for individuals who face the highest risk of severe illness, including older adults and people with weakened immune systems. Others will go without until the shipments arrive.
“Now that we haven’t got that government access, it’s shining the sunshine on how we actually cannot afford to vaccinate uninsured and underinsured adults,” said Tutson, who added that she is hoping that the situation will improve inside the following two weeks.
Delayed shipments or limited doses
Luis Borja, 70, of Los Angeles, was turned away last week when he went to get a free Covid vaccine at a local people medical institution in southern Los Angeles.
The clinic, run by St. John’s Community Health, said it did not have enough vaccines for everybody who wanted one, citing ongoing shipment delays from the Bridge Access Program.
That meant Borja, who lives below the federal poverty line, was largely out of options: He couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket, and his insurance, Medi-Cal, didn’t cover the fee of the shot at most retail pharmacies.
Borja, who’s originally from El Salvador, told NBC News in an interview in Spanish that he felt “a bit frustrated.”
Jim Mangia, the president and CEO of St. John’s Community Health, called it “a travesty.”
“We haven’t got the resources to supply for the communities most in need,” Mangia said. “The identical vaccine disparities seen before the pandemic are rearing their ugly head again.”
Almost 14 million Covid vaccines have been shipped to pharmacies and other locations since they were approved last month, in accordance with data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
A CDC spokesperson said in an announcement that the agency “has been in frequent contact with state health departments and has not been made aware of any system-wide shortages or obstacles to distribution of the updated COVID-19 vaccine to community health centers.”
Community Health Connection, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, only received a 3rd of the vaccine doses it ordered when its shipments arrived this week, in accordance with its CEO Jim McCarthy.
The medical institution requested 100 vials each from three federally funded programs, including the Bridge Access Program.
“We got 33 in each program,” McCarthy said. “So, we’re trying to search out out now, does that mean that there will be 33 more tomorrow, or ever?”
The middle serves greater than 20,000 people, a lot of whom are Latino. McCarthy said challenges with vaccination efforts have long existed in Oklahoma, where vaccine hesitancy has increased as misinformation runs rampant.
McCarthy said that a handful of individuals, mostly young, have come to the middle asking concerning the recent Covid vaccine. About 96% of patients live below the federal poverty line, and lots of are working individuals who travel backwards and forwards to go to family in Mexico, he said.
When Tulsa schools opened in August, before the brand new Covid vaccine was available, he said many parents also called the middle asking about vaccines for his or her children.
“There have been quite a lot of calls at that time limit about, ‘OK, our children are going back to high school — they possibly get exposed more, what can we do?'” he said. “And in fact, we did not have the vaccine.”
Lack of demand
Other centers are facing a special problem: People don’t need to be vaccinated.
The Life Health Center in Wilmington, Delaware, which primarily serves Black patients, hasn’t received any shipments of the updated vaccine, said Sharon Farrell, a primary pediatric nurse practitioner on the clinic.
Farrell said she recently ordered 200 doses: 100 for kids under 12 and 100 for kids and adults ages 12 and up. The doses, she said, should arrive next week.
“I’ve never not gotten the order that I asked for, but we asked for very low numbers,” she said. “So, I do not know. We’ll see, I suppose.”
But for Farrell, the issue is less about vaccine supply and more about people’s willingness to get it. The middle hasn’t needed to turn anyone away yet, because nobody has are available in to get the vaccine.
Farrell said that feelings of mistrust in federal government regulations and vaccine mandates should not unusual amongst Black and brown patients. These groups have historically been mistreated and medically abused up to now, she said.
It’s the same story in parts of Pennsylvania, where the vaccine rollout has also been slower than expected.
The Pennsylvania Association of Community Health Centers, which represents clinics across the state that serve an estimated 1 million people a 12 months, received just 900 Covid vaccines thus far, in accordance with Eric Kiehl, the organization’s director of policy and partnership.
While the state Health Department has prioritized getting vaccines to health centers with a bigger uninsured population, health centers that serve fewer uninsured patients “are probably still on the waitlist to get some vaccine,” Kiehl said.
“Our Department of Health will not be getting the quantity of vaccine that they’d anticipated, or no less than as quickly as they thought,” Kiehl said. “But, we’ve not been hearing quite a bit from our health centers that they’ve patients banging on their doors to get access to the vaccine.”