Name: Missouri to expand vaccination effort in mid-March
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Missouri to expand vaccination effort in mid-March

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Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.Last chance! Subscribe with this special offer to keep readingLoading&amp;hellp;{{title}}{{description}}{{banner}}(renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax){{tagline}}{{special_title}}{{html}}You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.© 2022 Lee EnterprisesShare ThisMissouri to expand vaccination effort in mid-MarchShare thisJEFFERSON CITY — Missouri is poised to offer 550,000 more of its residents the opportunity to get a COVID-19 vaccine.In an announcement Thursday, Gov. Mike Parson said teachers and school staff, child care providers, government employees, food workers and employees in other critical sectors of the economy would qualify for vaccines beginning March 15.“Good news for the state,” Parson told the Post-Dispatch in an interview at the Capitol preceding the announcement. “We’re getting a lot of shots in people’s arms.”Groups representing teachers, school boards and school administrators said they appreciated the decision.“Getting educators vaccinated as soon as possible is an important step toward keeping educators in the classroom and providing our students with in-person instruction,” said Doug Hayter, chairman of Missouri’s Education Roundtable.Just over 12% of the state’s population has received at least one dose of the vaccine since December. The state averaged 21,588 vaccinations per day in the past week.“We have made incredible progress in a short amount of time,” Parson said.But there are disparities in the rates of vaccinations by region.In the city of St. Louis, for example, 8.4% of the population has received shots, compared with the much smaller Shelby County, where 21% have received vaccinations.St. Louis County is reporting an 11.6% rate of vaccination.Missouri currently is vaccinating those in Phase 1B, Tiers 1 and 2. Parson said the move to Tier 3 was partially based on the increasing availability of vaccines. Federal regulators are expected to approve a one-shot vaccine by Johnson &amp; Johnson as soon as this weekend.“The process has been going better than we expected based on the timetables we’ve been doing,” the governor said. “I think the most important thing is that we’re just following the plan we’ve had since day one.”Parson’s belief that vaccination supplies will increase is mirrored in Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Wednesday that the state likely will see a significant increase in vaccine shipments in the coming weeks.Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna told Congress this week that they’ve solved bottlenecks and will produce a combined 140 million doses by the end of March, significantly more than the 80 million they’ve made to date. Johnson &amp; Johnson expects to have 20 million in that time.Parson said he announced the expansion now so people and vaccinators could begin preparing for the “next phase of this fight.”Parson said the state could open the vaccine rollout to the remainder of Missouri adults by May 1 if the vaccine supply increases as expected.Parson’s announcement came as Missouri reported 727 new COVID-19 cases and nine additional deaths, continuing a trend of fewer positive tests and fatalities linked to the respiratory virus. The Department of Health and Senior Services says 7,902 people have died from complications related to the disease in the past year.But even as numbers drop as more than 756,000 Missourians have gotten vaccines, the rollout of the vaccination processUnder the state’s tiered system, health care workers and nursing home residents were first in line, followed by anyone older than 65, emergency workers and people with high-risk medical conditions.Teachers have for higher vaccine priority, as most neighboring states have already vaccinated teachers. About 95% of Missouri’s school buildings are open to students in some capacity, according to the state education department.“Teachers should have been in it from the beginning,” said Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, D-Independence.The chairwoman of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus said her colleagues believe city dwellers have been shortchanged on vaccine doses.“Expedited government actions like this vaccine distribution effort have an unfortunate tendency to leave Black citizens behind. We cannot allow that to happen,” said Rep. Ashley Bland Manlove, D-Kansas City.Some St. Louis-area residents where there are more shots available.Parson said he understands the motivation of people who are desperate for a vaccine.“I don’t know that it’s a problem. We wish it wasn’t happening because of the way we’ve distributed the vaccine to each district. We would like to be able to keep the allotments for those people. But we also know the importance of getting vaccines in people’s arms,” Parson said.“It’s a tough scenario to try and control everybody who gets in one of those lines when they qualify because at the end of the day we want everybody to get vaccinated,” Parson said. “People will drive a long way to get a vaccine. It’s OK. We just have to deal with that. I know it’s tough to be patient.”Rizzo said he would have put more focus on vaccinating people in urban areas because COVID-19 is a communicable disease.“I would take care of the dense populations first. People shouldn’t be driving from an urban area an hour to a rural area to get a vaccination,” Rizzo said.At the announcement, Parson insisted the distribution was being done fairly.“There is no division between rural and urban Missouri. That is totally inaccurate,” Parson said.Mass vax mix-upsMike O’Connell, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety, said Thursday the state reinforced to local officials that only people in eligible tiers — currently Phase 1A, Phase 1B-Tier 1 and Phase 1B-Tier 2 — should be receiving the vaccine.The state also reinforced that extra doses are redistributed within a region and that they don’t go to waste.The effort to remind local officials of protocols follows a mass vaccination event on Wednesday in Bollinger County. The event was reportedly opened to anyone that afternoon so that shots wouldn’t go to waste, .“This (vaccine) does not go to waste,” O’Connell said. “You’re to administer it to the people in the existing tiers.“They’re working to explain that again to everybody,” he said. O’Connell confirmed later Thursday that the issue was discussed on a regular call with regional partners.O’Connell also said the state changed its Vaccine Navigator as of this week so that any Missourian can register for any state-supported vaccination event, regardless of the Highway Patrol region where they live.“The way that Vaccine Navigator was originally set up, folks could not register for events outside of their own region — across the state,” he said. “This week — we believe on Monday — that restriction was lifted.”Jack Suntrup of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.{{title}}{{summary}}You don't have any notifications.Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.Topics

Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.Last chance! Subscribe with this special offer to keep readingLoading&amp;hellp;{{title}}{{description}}{{banner}}(renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax){{tagline}}{{special_title}}{{html}}You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.© 2022 Lee EnterprisesShare ThisMissouri to expand vaccination effort in mid-MarchShare thisJEFFERSON CITY — Missouri is poised to offer 550,000 more of its residents...

Missouri to expand vaccination effort in mid-March

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