Oklahoma health officials are again scaling back their coronavirus vaccination plans because of the federal government.<\/p>
The state\u2019s urban health departments announced a new partnership to create mass vaccination sites in Oklahoma City and Tulsa during a press conference last week. The plan would use a new stream of vaccine supply \u2014 separate from the thousands of doses already distributed to the state.<\/p>
Deputy Commissioner of Health Keith Reed announced Tuesday the federal government went back on the new stream, and that state supply wouldn\u2019t cut it.<\/p>
\u201cI’m not going to say I’m mad or angry, I’m just going to say I’m really frustrated with it and definitely disappointed for Oklahoma,\u201d he said.<\/p>
Officials have been using the phrase POD \u2014 or points of dispensing. Health officials from Oklahoma City and Tulsa\u2019s independent health departments announced last week the creation of so-called mega-PODS. Those would use a separate federal stream of vaccine supply to administer 6,000 shots a day in each city.<\/p>
The Oklahoma City-County Health Department and the Tulsa County Health Department each held a press conference last Thursday, where they announced the plan.<\/p>
Mega-PODs were to function as a partnership among state and county health officials, FEMA and the National Guard. Reed said during the press conference that the federal government did guarantee the supply \u2014 up until it didn\u2019t.<\/p>
\u201cThe information we were given did very specifically say that the PODs would include federal allocation,\u201d Reed said. \u201cAnd then as we delved into it deeper and started reaching in and asking for more clarification about where the vaccine was coming from. We were told that the fact that there was federal allocation coming with that was actually \u2018pre-decisional.\u2019 And I can only assume that \u2018pre-decisional\u2019 means that they had the option to change your minds on it. So when we found out that it was no longer going to be (federal) supply with the mega-PODs, then we had to really evaluate our options.\u201d<\/p>
Although the news was disappointing, he said, it wasn\u2019t necessarily surprising.<\/p>
\u201cI was a little bit skeptical early on about the allocation coming from the federal government because it didn’t match with what we were hearing about vaccine inventory,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I think that that bit of skepticism for me may help manage my expectations about it.\u201d<\/p>
He also noted this wasn\u2019t the first time that the federal government made a promise about supply and then went back on it.<\/p>
In January, state health officials were expecting the state\u2019s allocation to increase significantly. For months, federal officials had been discussing a stockpile of vaccines that were reserved for second doses. The outgoing Trump and incoming Biden administrations debated over how best to use it. Then, the Washington Post reported that the Trump Administration had already depleted it.<\/p>
\u201cI was under the illusion earlier this week that there was additional supply out there, and it was sitting there,\u201d Reed said during the Jan. 15 briefing.<\/p>
He said he learned that the increase in supply wasn\u2019t coming \u2014 but not why \u2014 the day before, and that he learned the stockpile didn\u2019t exist from media reports.<\/p>
During Tuesday\u2019s briefing, Reed acknowledged that disappointments have come from vaccine officials under each administration, and that communications breakdowns like these tend to happen during emergencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oklahoma health officials are again scaling back their coronavirus vaccination plans because of the federal government.The state\u2019s urban health departments announced a new partnership to create mass vaccination sites in Oklahoma City and Tulsa during a press conference last week. The plan would use a new stream of vaccine supply \u2014 separate from the thousands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33813"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33814,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33813\/revisions\/33814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}