Frustrated over the rocky start of coronavirus vaccinations in Illinois, local health officials expressed dismay over the state’s oversight of the rollout Thursday to a panel of state lawmakers.
Public health officials in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration countered that the pace of vaccinations is picking up and will get even faster as more vaccine doses become available in coming weeks. They pleaded for patience and blamed the sluggish start on the lack of enough doses to meet the overwhelming demand.
But while acknowledging the supply problems, the local health officials said their efforts have been hampered by inconsistent and unclear communication from the state to both local health departments and the public.
“More vaccine can solve a problem, but we all need to be going on the same page,” Craig Beintema, public health administrator for the Stephenson County Health Department in north-central Illinois, said during a virtual meeting of the Senate Health Committee.
Beintema and some of his counterparts voiced frustration with the lack of advance notice from the Illinois Department of Public Health about how many doses of the vaccine they’ll receive each week.
They also questioned Pritzker’s recent decision to expand eligibility to people younger than 65 with certain health conditions beginning Feb. 25, even as the seniors and essential workers already eligible struggle to land appointments.
The Pritzker administration estimated the expansion would make an additional 3 million people eligible statewide to receive the vaccine.,
Together with the health care workers who were first in line to receive the vaccine and the estimated 3.2 million front-line essential workers and residents 65 and older who became eligible under phase 1b of the state’s plan, the change would open vaccinations to roughly half of all Illinois residents.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said their health departments would not follow Pritzker’s lead on expanding the pool because there aren’t sufficient doses to meet the current need.
“All we do is we make people happy for five minutes and then frustrate them for the next five months,” Chicago public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said during the Senate hearing.
The governor’s office said the promise of increased shipments of vaccine doses from the federal government and the expected authorization of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose COVID-19 vaccine later this month will make the expansion possible, even while urging continued patience.
“Federal guidance already includes this vulnerable group, and the governor is particularly invested in expanding access because this group includes a disproportionately large share of vulnerable people of color,” spokeswoman Emily Bittner said in a statement.
The Senate hearing came as the state surpassed 1.5 million COVID-19 vaccinations administered, with more than 300,000 of those being second doses of the two-shot regimen.
A Tribune investigation published a week ago showed that Illinois was lagging behind most other states in the speed of vaccine distribution. The state has been increasing the number of shots delivered each day— an achievement touted regularly by the Pritzker administration. But other states were moving even faster, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the past week, Illinois has begun to catch up, and the state is now ranked 37th in the rate of shots injected among 50 states and the District of Columbia, after being 45th a week earlier.
Another way to compare states is by the percentage of doses they’ve received that they’ve already injected into arms. In that metric, in the past week, Illinois has improved from ranking 41st in the nation to 32nd.
The state has now injected 66.2% of shots it’s received from the federal government. Of the six largest states, Illinois now ranks above two of them, while still significantly trailing the leader of that group, Texas, at 71.2%.
Andrew Friend, deputy director of the state health department’s Office of Preparedness & Response, pointed to the recent improvements as a sign that Illinois is building the capacity to administer shots to more people as the supply increases.
There are 100 Illinois National Guard teams in various stages of training and deployment that eventually will be able to administer 900,000 vaccinations per week, Friend told lawmakers.
The state also announced Thursday that it is bringing in federal Disaster Survivor Assistance teams through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist with community outreach in Cook and St. Clair counties.
“As that supply grows, we’re going to have the capacity to support that and immediately push it out and get access to as many people across the state, no matter where you’re from, as quickly and as safely as possible,” Friend said.
In response to calls from local health departments for more timely information about their vaccine allocations, Friend said the state this week would begin providing three-week projections.
But he also said the state is monitoring how quickly health departments are using what they’ve been given and will shift future doses to other areas if they’re not being dispensed quickly enough.
“Our intent is for every week every single provider in the state to run completely out of vaccine because that’s the quickest way to get it to those who need it most and to save lives,” he said.
One of the goals is the get as many people as possible vaccinated before new variants of the virus can take hold, Friend said.
The state health department on Thursday said Illinois’ first case of a new virus variant that originated in South Africa was identified in Rock Island. The variant, called the B. 1.351 strain, was first reported in the U.S. at the end of January.
Previously, 22 cases of a variant from the United Kingdom had been identified in the state, public health officials reported. Studies so far suggest current COVID-19 vaccines may offer some protection against the variants, which have been shown to spread more quickly.
In its review of the state’s vaccine rollout so far, the Tribune found a largely disjointed effort.
Doses go to local health departments and other vaccine providers, from hospitals to clinics. The state and Chicago health departments each get shots to distribute, and they measure things differently.
Chicago pushes its providers to administer at least 85% of its shots within a week. As of last week, city data showed the average rate was below that, but Arwady told state lawmakers Thursday the rate has since risen above that threshold.
The state has let a largely decentralized system of 97 local health departments figure out who’d be targeted and how fast to administer shots. The state has not stated any specific metric to measure success.
Throughout the process, the government has not released precise data on which providers are getting how many shots, and what they’ve done with them. That has frustrated some local health officials who say they suspect their areas are not getting the number of doses they deserve.
The state administered 69,029 vaccinations on Wednesday, bringing the state total to 1,549,108. The number of Illinois residents who have been fully vaccinated — receiving both of the required two shots — reached 346,773.
Over the past seven days, the state averaged 56,094 vaccines administered daily. One week ago, that number was 46,709.
“Something that everyone in Illinois should know is that things are moving in a very positive direction,” Pritzker said after touring a vaccination site in Elgin on Thursday. “It does the heart good to see people getting vaccinated and to know that we’re seeing the light at the end of this terrible COVID tunnel.”
The state on Thursday reported 2,838 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 and 102 additional fatalities, the first time in two weeks that the daily death toll topped 100.
dpetrella@chicagotribune.com
jmahr@chicagotribune.com
