Governor Baker: Let towns distribute the COVID-19 vaccines!

I can confidently say that the vaccine rollout in the Commonwealth has been a mess. There have been hang-ups and barriers almost every step of the way. The website was hard to navigate, there were no appointments, there were no locations on the cape or south shore, people are logging in at midnight on Thursday trying to actually book appointments, the list goes on. The few bright spots have been the early vaccination of healthcare workers, often by their place of work, and vaccinating our first responders. The success vaccinating first responders is largely due to the efforts of local public health departments. When doses were allocated to cities and towns to coordinate their own vaccine clinics, they’ve been overwhelmingly successful. That includes early clinics in Whitman.

This isn’t a surprise. For years, at least since the 2001 Anthrax scare, every city and town in Massachusetts has been required by DPH to develop and maintain their own Emergency Dispensing Site plans. These plans were updated regularly, particularly after lessons learned from H1N1 and in the early days of COVID-19. And when the time came to implement the plans to protect our first responders in January it was seamless. That continued into later parts of Phase 1 as congregate care settings were taken care of.

Somewhere along the way Governor Baker decided to focus the distribution plan on centralized “Mass Vaccination Sites”, most notably Gillette Stadium and Fenway Park. The problem is that the beginning of Phase 2 was residents 75 and older. So here in Whitman they were expecting our seniors to drive to Gillette Stadium, or even to Fenway where they need to pay for parking. Many of these residents are comfortable driving around town but aren’t up to driving to Foxboro or Boston. Realizing this is an issue, rather than allow local public health departments to do what they do best, the Governor updated Phase 2 to include companion vaccines at Mass Vaccination Sites. This has, predictably, been taken advantage of by young people willing to pay septuagenarians. It became a joke in the national news.

In Whitman we have a contract negotiated with Local 1769 representing our Firefighters to distribute the vaccine. We have a list of vetted nurse volunteers we can utilize in the event of a scale up. We have an agreement to use an indoor space to avoid lines of people waiting out in the cold. We’re ready, we just don’t have doses of the vaccines.

This is particularly troubling because Whitman is a bedroom community, and our demographics skew older. We share that with much of Plymouth County and Cape Cod, an area that despite being older than most of the state has far fewer vaccination sites. As I type this there are thousands of vacant appointments at Gillette Stadium this week, and hundreds of eligible Whitman residents unable to make that 30 mile drive each way. The closer Marshfield Fairgrounds (15 miles each way) have no openings.

There are lots of little tweaks that need to happen: add asthma as a preexisting condition, allow preregistration, save your information from one appointment to the next, don’t expect people in their 80s to register for something online and drive to a sports stadium. But the biggest thing that can be done to get Massachusetts to use more than 72% of our allotted vaccines is to trust the local governments that have prepared for this. The problem isn’t going to get easier as Phase 2 progresses. It will be a lot easier to have local fire departments run vaccine clinics at each school than ask teachers to leave for a few hours to go to Fenway Park. Likewise when you get to other age groups in Phase 3 that are less likely to be retired.

We know our residents; they have existing relationships with us. I don’t know what information led the Governor to abandon the 20 years of planning at the community level in favor of contracting CVS and CIC Health, but it isn’t working for us. Please reconsider and use the infrastructure that is ready to go. We’re ready, let us help!