Missouri health officials plan no mass COVID-19 vaccination sites for big cities

The mass Covid-19 vaccination events to be set up mostly across rural Missouri by the National Guard will likely not take place in Kansas City and St. Louis, state officials told lawmakers Wednesday.

The state’s plan is to instead let hospitals with high patient volumes in urban areas handle most of the vaccinations there. Officials will make exceptions for the National Guard to hold smaller events in the two cities, targeting what they termed vulnerable populations.

“That is our counterbalance,” health department director Dr. Randall Williams said in a hearing on vaccine distribution before the House health and mental health policy committee.

Gov. Mike Parson’s administration sought to defend their balancing act before lawmakers who jockeyed to get more attention for their constituents in the vaccine distribution efforts.

Rep. Patty Lewis, a Kansas City Democrat, brought up state figures showing 5.5% of Jackson County’s population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to 12.8% in Cape Girardeau County in southwest Missouri.

While some rural communities feel forgotten, “I’m here to tell you that urban feels forgotten, too,” she said.

Health officials have faced criticism for CDC figures that put Missouri near the bottom of the nation in vaccination rates, and as states have pleaded with the federal government for more doses.

As of Tuesday, Missouri’s numbers had improved, officials said. Seven percent of Missourians had gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, behind the national average of 8%.

The state has blamed a supply shortage on a federal program that has forced participating states to give up more doses than needed to CVS and Walgreens, to vaccinate long-term care facilities’ residents and staff. Parson’s deputy chief of staff Robert Knodell said he expects next week for the state to begin getting back unused doses sent to that program.

Missouri expects over the next month to receive about 88,000 doses of the vaccine per week from the federal government, and give the majority of them to hospitals in nine geographic regions that are able to vaccinate 5,000 patients weekly.

Adam Crumbliss, director of the Division of Community and Public Health, told House members the state is aiming to distribute doses among the regions proportionally to their population, while considering factors such as the logistics of storing the vaccine and populations of Black and Latino residents heavily affected by the pandemic.

“There’s a multiplicity of these types of factors,” Crumbliss said.

That’s why, Parson’s deputy chief of staff Robert Knodell said, the state’s National Guard will be sent in “targeted teams” to Kansas City and St. Louis to hold vaccination events in disadvantaged communities that officials or health institutions often find harder to reach.

Those events, which have yet to be announced, will be “more surgical in nature” than this week’s nine regional mass vaccination sites, which some lawmakers pointed out are far from the state’s more populated urban centers.

Williams estimated the state could move into the next tier of vaccine priorities, for critical infrastructure workers such as teachers, transportation and agriculture workers as early as April.