When is my turn for the COVID-19 vaccine? Who tells me? Where do I get it?
Last year was riddled with confusion about COVID-19 tests. Where to get them? Who’s in charge of distribution? Who is eligible for a test, and who isn’t? Which tests are available?
Now, vaccines may have surpassed tests as the most coveted, most confusing and most ever-changing tool to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, local public health districts, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection and individual health care providers are constantly rolling out new information about COVID-19 vaccines. Here’s a guide to help you find answers, based on information available Jan. 13:
Q: When will everyone in Idaho be offered a COVID-19 vaccine?
The state on Tuesday announced a new timeline for rollout. It is posted on the vaccine section of the state’s coronavirus.idaho.gov website. Health care workers and some high-risk groups such as long-term care facility residents have been getting their shots since mid-December. Now, the state has opened the gates for an estimated 500,000 more Idahoans to start lining up for their vaccine.
These Idahoans were added to the rollout as of Jan. 12:
- First responders, such as firefighters and police
- Safety workers, such as community support staff
- Educators and staff at preschool through high school level, and in child care centers
- Correctional and detention facility staff.
These Idahoans will be added in early February:
- Adults age 65 and older
These Idahoans will be added in mid-February:
- Food and agriculture workers, from farms to food processing (including U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors) to grocery, convenience store and food pantry staff
- Idaho National Guard
- Manufacturing workers
- Public transit workers
- U.S. Postal Service workers
After these groups, the state will open up the vaccine in March and April to people age 16 to 64 who have high-risk medical conditions; and essential workers not included in previous groups. Finally, the vaccine will open up to the general public in May. Children under age 16 may be added to the rollout at that point, if a vaccine has been authorized for use on children.
That timeline can change, as can each of the groups included in each phase. Just a week ago, Idahoans age 65 and older weren’t on the rollout schedule until April.
Q: Who decides Idaho’s vaccine priorities? How do they decide?
Gov. Little directed the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare to put together a Coronavirus Vaccine Advisory Committee, charged with figuring out the details of Idaho’s vaccination plan for COVID-19. Their recommendations are subject to the governor’s approval.
Want to voice your opinion? Send public comments to the committee at covid19vaccinepubliccomment@dhw.idaho.gov.
The group is making its decisions based on a set of sometimes competing goals and guiding principles, including:
- Reducing the number of people who transmit, die or get severely ill from the coronavirus
Keeping the health care system from being overloaded
Helping society and Idaho’s economy recover
Protecting people who are at risk
Ensuring equity in vaccine distribution
Transparency in their vaccine decision-making.
The committee includes dozens of people who represent stakeholder groups such as hospitals, medical providers, older and vulnerable populations, pharmacies and social services.
The Department of Health and Welfare on Dec. 30 issued an estimated timeline for various groups to start getting immunized. That timeline is based on the committee’s decisions and guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and largely follows the broad priority groups laid out by ACIP.
The timeline shows the last group — the general public — starting to receive vaccinations in May. That is consistent with what national vaccine development experts projected last summer.
Q: Older people are at higher risk of death from COVID-19. Why aren’t they first in line?
Idaho Gov. Little gave an explanation Tuesday, when he announced that educators would be eligible before people age 65 and over.
“Why? Because the 65 and older population is enormous. And there’s still work actively being done to build up capacity among our providers to take on this population,” he said. “We do not want to create a bubble or a backlog. Once we get a handle on capacity, we will be able to get to the 65 and older population. Also, the health of our teachers is paramount to ensuring students can learn in the classroom.”
Q: How will I find out when it’s my turn?
Pay attention to local news outlets. Health care providers, the Department of Health and Welfare and Idaho’s local public health districts will make announcements whenever the vaccine committee makes a decision, and when new groups of Idahoans are eligible. They will share the information on social media, in press releases and other usual forms of communication.
Q: Where will I go for my shot?
Generally, the same place they go for a flu shot. But there may be exceptions, as not all health care providers are signed up to give the vaccine, and the process is different.
The Department of Health and Welfare says: “For people without a primary care physician, access to vaccines may be through places such as your employer, local public health agencies, federally qualified health centers and pharmacies.”
Some health care providers were taken by surprise by this week’s announcement. They had just begun to vaccinate groups of Idahoans who were in the first phase, so they are hustling to catch up and be ready for second phase tiers.
“While the details of today’s announcement were not known to St. Luke’s before the governor’s news conference, we understood that timely adjustments would be made to the phases,” said a written statement from St. Luke’s Health System. “We will be working with health districts promptly to ensure appropriate access is provided to people in the newly defined priority groups.”
Q: Why haven’t more people been vaccinated? Is the rollout going too slowly?
It is going more slowly than public health officials would like, and it has been uneven. There are a few reasons for this. State officials said Tuesday that Idaho’s vaccination rollout speed is about average for the U.S.
Elke Shaw-Tulloch, who heads Idaho’s public health division, said on Tuesday that Idaho will have received 155,175 doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of the end of this week, including the doses earmarked for a special program for pharmacies to vaccinate long-term care facility residents and staff.
About 42,600 doses had been administered as of Thursday morning, according to Idaho’s COVID-19 vaccine data dashboard. More than 7,000 people have been fully vaccinated.
However, each dose administered can take up to three days to show up in the public data, because of the record-keeping process. The data on how many doses have been allocated and delivered to Idaho don’t have that lag time. So it can appear that doses are going out more slowly than they are.
There also is a problem with supply and demand. The federal government has controlled the supply chain, and health officials for the Boise area said the area isn’t getting enough doses to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, in East Idaho, and likely in other pockets of the state, health care providers had too many doses left over as people decided they didn’t want the vaccine, state officials said Tuesday.
Health and Welfare Director Dave Jeppesen said state and local governments are doing a “delicate dance” to manage vaccine rollout.
“There’s how much supply that we’re getting, and that we just found out today is going to change,” he said, referring to a Trump administration announcement that it will ship out all COVID-19 vaccine doses, instead of holding back booster shots to be delivered on a different schedule. This may speed up the rollout, but it also has prompted questions among public health officials about how to ensure people receive both doses on time — three or four weeks apart.
Jeppesen said that supply is one of three “levers” Idaho can use to manage vaccine rollout.
“There’s how much capacity do we have to administer vaccine around the state. And then the third is really how much demand (is there), which is really the priority groups,” he said. “How many people are coming into to get vaccinated? And it’s really going to be an ongoing, ever-changing adjustment dance between those three levers, as we move forward. ... We’ll want to make sure that we have enough demand that is consuming all of their capacity and supply, but not over-consuming and creating huge lines and backlogs and frustrations with members of the public.”
Jeppesen said it’s a daily or even hourly effort to manage the doses coming into Idaho, getting to the right places, then being injected into arms.
Q: How many people are declining the shot, and why?
The state isn’t yet tracking that. Coronavirus vaccine data comes from the Immunization Reminder Information System, a private database that tracks when vaccines are given — not when or why someone opts out of getting a shot.
Officials have said they’re very interested in the information and hope to gather it soon.
Some health care workers in the first phases of rollout have refused the vaccine. A major survey of nurses around the country offered some insight — and suggested that the main reasons were distrust and lack of information.
Even though 64% said they were somewhat or very confident that a COVID-19 vaccine would be safe and effective, only about one third of nurses said they would get the shot if their employer didn’t require them to. (Another 31% said they were unsure if they would get it.) Few said they felt “very knowledgeable” about the COVID-19 development process, and more than 75% said they thought vaccine development was rushed, that they didn’t have enough information about the vaccine and were skeptical or unclear on the clinical trial process.
Both of the vaccines authorized for emergency use have gone through the same clinical trial process as other vaccines, and while they rely on a relatively new technology, that technology has been used on a smaller scale in vaccines for years. The COVID-19 vaccines rolled out faster than others because some of the clinical trial phases happened simultaneously; there was no problem finding people willing to volunteer for trials; and the world’s scientists and medical researchers were focused on the coronavirus, sharing their knowledge and findings in a way they hadn’t before.
Q: Have any vials of the vaccine gone bad or been thrown away?
State officials have said the waste has been very minimal at this point but haven’t given an exact number.
Q: Can I choose which vaccine I get?
You likely won’t have a choice which vaccine you receive — at least, not at this point. Most of the vaccines coming into Idaho right now are manufactured by Moderna, with fewer doses arriving from Pfizer. Both of the vaccines are mRNA vaccines, which is described by a former CDC director, Dr. Tom Frieden, like this: “An mRNA vaccine doesn’t actually contain the virus itself. Think of it as an email sent to your immune system that shows what the virus looks like, instructions to kill it, and then—like a Snapchat message—it disappears. Amazing technology.”
There are other vaccines in the pipeline for emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, including the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines.
