WICHITA, Kansas — The first of potentially several COVID-19 vaccines could get emergency approval by the end of the week.
But that major milestone is just the beginning of the work for local and state health departments in Kansas that will have to get the pandemic-stalling shots to people — and decide who gets it first, when and how.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment said trucks full of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine will ship this week to the five ultra-cold storage locations, including at the University of Kansas Health System hospital in Kansas City, Kansas.
“Which may mean we can begin vaccinating as early as Friday,” said Health System Chief Medical Officer Steve Stites.
But the logistic problems get more complicated from there.
Vaccinations might begin at the end of this week, but the state only expects to get 23,750 doses in the first deliveries. That’s not enough to even vaccinate all of the people considered to be in Phase 1a of the distribution plan — doctors, nurses and other staff in direct contact with COVID patients. The state estimates that’s about 35,000-40,000 people, each needing two doses.
That means hospitals and clinics will have to make tough decisions about who is first in line.
“We’ve spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours looking at how we’ll distribute the vaccine here internally and how we start identifying people,” Stites said.
In the state’s latest vaccine plan, Phase 1 will also include other highly vulnerable people, including nursing home residents.
As more vaccines become available, distribution will expand to other essential workers and at-risk populations in Phase 2, likely next spring. Then, as production ramps up more, the state will move to Phase 3 sometime next summer and provide the vaccine to everybody.
But the exact order of who gets it and when remains still vague and an advisory group is hashing out those standards.
Some of those decisions could be politically fraught, especially when it comes to serving vulnerable populations.
Statistics show that the coronavirus hit prisons particularly hard — after all, it can be hard to socially distance and hand sanitizer is banned because it’s made of alcohol. And there’s a risk of the disease bouncing in and out of the prison, to the community and back. That makes inmates and guards good candidates to get the shots early.
“But one could easily anticipate that there will be pushback if a state announces it’s going to focus one of its earliest phases of vaccination on prisons before it makes it available for the general population,” said R. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin.
That’s just among the first challenges. The logistics of getting the vaccine from manufacturer to patient present another hurdle.
