'We're going to take care of you, okay?' In Alabama, the scramble to get vaccines to the people....

[COL Mustard]

It's going to be a long haul in Alabama to get everyone vaccinated.

Source: Washington Post

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/27/alabama-covid-vaccination/?itid=hp-top-table-main

Excerpt: By Stephanie McCrummen
MARCH 27, 2021

UNIONTOWN, Alabama — Eight weeks had passed since the first vaccine doses arrived in Alabama, and now the shots were finally coming to Uniontown. Workers were setting up chairs in the cinder block community center. The mayor was on the way. A caravan of doctors and nurses and supplies was speeding down Highway 5 past fields of cows and rusting gas stations, and when it pulled into the parking lot just past 8 a.m., the line was waiting, a continuation of the waiting that had been life for the past year.

“Connell!” yelled a volunteer, handing out registration forms. “Bennett! Watson!”

“Here I am!” said an elderly woman bumping her walker across the gravel.

[crickets]

1. Wow.

It was not exactly a thrilling moment. The box came with no advance notice, no directions for where the doses were supposed to be distributed, no extra funding to help cover costs, no extra anything and at the exact point when Cahaba’s 450 employees were nearing exhaustion after a year of managing coronavirus testing while keeping eight clinics open.

In an ideal world, Waits said, the National Guard would have been doing vaccine drills for weeks in advance and been mobilized to football fields across the state. Instead, a nurse was calling him on the phone saying, “It’s here.”

Yes, by all means, let's give the Orange One all of the credit he deserves.

Thank goodness for all of the amazing health workers and administrators who have worked tirelessly to get the job done. Kudos to them.

[Hortensis]

2. :) Cahaba had greatness thrust upon them, all right.

And all those mostly very poor and elderly people who'd been looking for vaccinations for months. Good article. Thanks, COL Mustard. I'd passed on it in the paper.

In Alabama, it began with the decision by the state health department, weakened by years of budget cuts, to outsource most of the responsibility to community health organizations with experience serving the neediest areas. That was the idea.

The reality was that while Cahaba’s leaders expected that the state would send them vaccines at some point for their own patients, the first clue that they were expected to conduct vaccinations on a massive scale came on Jan. 6, when a box of 1,800 doses arrived at one of their clinics, the word “vaccine” stamped on the side.