75,000 doses of COVID vaccine headed to Kansas and Missouri. Here’s who will get them
Health officials in Kansas and Missouri expect to receive the first shipments of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine around the middle of December.
Kansas officials expect 23,750 doses. Missouri anticipates 51,000. Each person will require two shots.
When Kansas and Missouri residents begin getting them depends on whether the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the drug maker’s application for an emergency use authorization.
That decision is expected around Dec. 10. If approved, the vaccine could arrive between Dec. 13 and 15, health officials in both states said.
“That’s not a concrete date, give or take a few days. That’s kind of what we’re hearing could happen if it’s approved,” said Lisa Cox, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
On Tuesday, a federal advisory group recommended that the first doses go to health care workers, as well as residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
That recommendation largely syncs up with plans Missouri and Kansas already made, starting with health care workers, then nursing home residents and workers.
“Importantly, the vaccine will be made available based upon principles of maximizing benefit, minimizing harm and striving for equity, justice and fairness,” Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly told reporters Wednesday.
Drug maker Moderna has also applied for emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine. If approved — a decision expected around Dec. 17 — health officials in both states expect to receive doses of that vaccine during the week of Dec. 21.
Kelly said Kansas will receive 150,000 vaccine doses by the end of December, enough to vaccinate 75,000 people.
At this point, state health officials are working with moving targets. Information about the number of doses they’ll receive, when those will arrive and who will be recommended to get them changes often, sometimes hourly, one Kansas health official said this week.
Vaccinating the general population of Kansas probably wouldn’t begin until summer, Phil Griffin with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment told a legislative budget committee in a virtual appearance on Tuesday.
As for Missouri, “it’s kind of hard to speculate because we don’t know exactly what every shipment is going to look like week after week,” said Cox. “We’re kind of getting estimates now for these first few weeks.
“But we’re hopeful that we’ll be meeting some of the need of the general public around April. But that’s kind of speculation at this point.”
Both states spent months coming up with plans for distributing the vaccines. Griffin, bureau director for disease control and prevention in Kansas, called the state’s plan “a living document” that’s being “continuously updated.”
Receiving the vaccine doses is just the first step. Then comes the challenge to get people to take them.
“A vaccine is only a vaccine,” said Griffin. “It’s the vaccination that really matters. And until we move from the vaccine to the actual vaccination, we’ve done no good.”
Who decides who gets it?
On Tuesday, the 14-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended who should receive the COVID-19 vaccines first. The group advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The group voted 13-1 that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities should get top priority. Under that plan, about 21 million health care workers and 3 million adults in long-term care facilities would be eligible.
“We are specifically looking at the time frame where there is going to be a limited number of doses … talking about the first 20 to 40 million doses,” said Dr. Kevin Ault, a member of the advisory group and an OB-GYN with The University of Kansas Health System.
He said the group’s decision was difficult because it hasn’t seen all the data from phase 3 trials — typically the last phase of testing involving thousands of participants — and can’t know how the vaccine will affect elderly and other at-risk people.
“The reason long-term care facilities came to the front is the tremendous mortality in that group. I think we said … about 100,000 deaths in that population,” said Ault.
Decisions about which health care workers get the vaccine first will likely be made by individual hospitals, and those decisions could be different from facility to facility, said Ault.
“At the federal level, the CDC will provide broad recommendations, and states are responsible for breaking that down into state-specific groups and priorities,” said Griffin.
In Kansas, about 35,000 to 40,000 health care workers would be eligible in that first round, Griffin said. Missouri’s number was not available.
“So obviously you can see in the very beginning we’re not going to have enough vaccine to vaccinate everyone,” he said. “But I would say that we have a pretty good chance to vaccinate everyone in that group who is willing to accept the vaccine.”
Health officials are preparing for the challenge of convincing people to take the vaccine. Pfizer’s research revealed that about 45% of people are willing to take it, 20% said they won’t and about 35% are on the fence. “So you see numbers all over the place,” he said.
On Wednesday, Britain approved emergency use of the vaccine, developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. The first doses are expected to be given next week.
Griffin said once the FDA decides to grant emergency use authorization to the drug makers, the advisory group plans to meet within 24 hours to recommend who should get it, or who shouldn’t.
Health officials do not expect to see any recommendations about giving the vaccine to children or pregnant women, Griffin said, not because it’s been found to be unsafe but because those groups are more vulnerable.
“There are children’s studies being ramped up right now,” Griffin said, “and we anticipate it won’t be a significant amount of time when it will be available to children as well.”
Essential workers come next?
After the first shipments of the Pfizer vaccine, “there will be a steady increase of vaccine coming,” said Griffin. “We would expect Moderna to be providing vaccine shortly thereafter. They have a slightly smaller amount in their initial allocation. We don’t have the exact numbers on them yet.
“But there’s a good chance that some of their vaccine will begin coming out to the jurisdictions in the week of Christmas. And then there will be some additional vaccine coming in January from both manufacturers.”
Vaccines will probably be offered beyond the first priority groups next spring, at the earliest, Griffin said. Details are still being worked out about the priority of people in the second and third phases, he said. One discussion revolves around essential workers.
“Which essential workers are going to come first?” he said. “There’s a lot of ethical debate around that, and just a lot of understanding that we all need to look at not only from a health standpoint but also from an economic standpoint.
“When we’re telling people they need to be essential workers, they need to be out there, then we need to start evaluating what are the risks.”
The Star’s Jonathan Shorman contributed to the report.
This story was originally published December 2, 2020 at 1:19 PM.
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