Reply to Covid Vaccine DC- "Separate, but Equal"??

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Reply to "Covid Vaccine DC- "Separate, but Equal"??"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't begrudge anyone who is legally offered the vaccine going ahead and taking it. I will freely criticize how DC is administering those opportunities, and if they changed the rules it would apply to me as well. Right now there is ZERO mention of these hospital vaccines going to the sickest of the sick. Patients who are 65+ and have been patients in the last 2 years are encouraged to call for appointment. It's becoming obvious that this is in fact about passing the costs of adminstering the vaccines on to insurers, as recent patients will have insurance on file with the hospital who will submit the claim. Patients who show up at a pharmacy, GIANT or other DC adminstering site may or may not have an insurance card in hand and the city will have to backfill all of that. So basically, if you have insurance in DC on file at a hospital, you get to wait in the club lounge and hop in the expedited lane. Those are the dots Im connecting; have seen nothing to indicate a different explanation.[/quote]

I don't think it's about the city backfilling insurance payments. It's partly about the Pfizer vaccine not being possible to administer except in hospitals, because Giant and Safeway can't store it. And it's also partly about easing some of the demand on the city portal (and the city-run sites) by shunting some people into a different line.

I'm not sure it's necessarily obvious that the hospital wait lists are "the club lounge" or an expedited line, either; we don't really know how many doses are available at the hospitals.

Other jurisdictions are doing the same thing (also due to the Moderna vs. Pfizer logistics, in part, I'm sure) -- my father-in-law in New York was registered for an appointment through the city for this weekend, after my mother-in-law spent four consecutive days online trying to sign them up for one, and then he wound up getting it from the hospital when he was getting a chemotherapy treatment. (They only vaccinated him, not my mother-in-law, so she'll keep waiting until their weekend municipal appointment.) In Maryland, some health systems are encouraging people to sign up through the health system, others are running their appointments through the state system. If the goal is just to get as many people vaccinated as possible as fast as possible with limited supply, it seems like making it easy for the hospitals to distribute their own allocations is useful.[/quote]

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