As Parson praises Arrowhead ‘mega’ event, local backlog remains and frustration simmers
An unending line of vehicles snaked across a sea of asphalt outside Arrowhead Stadium on Friday, as thousands of Missourians lined up for inoculation from COVID-19 at the state’s first “mega-vaccination” event.
Near the heart of Chiefs Kingdom, Gov. Mike Parson surveyed this vaccination kingdom and declared it good.
“It’s a proud day for me as governor to be here at Arrowhead today and see good things happening right here in the state of Missouri,” Parson told a throng of reporters.
The vaccination site, sprawled across a massive parking lot, is expected to put shots in 8,000 arms this weekend. Vaccinators are deploying the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine for the event, which will add thousands to the ranks of the fully-vaccinated over two days.
The “mega-vaccination” event — the largest to date in Missouri, let alone the Kansas City area — culminates a major shift in the state’s distribution strategy over the last several weeks. It took place amid withering criticism that Parson was neglecting urban areas and state-commissioned reports documenting backlogs in eligible city residents who hadn’t yet been vaccinated.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas went as far as inviting federal intervention in Missouri’s vaccine distribution, calling for federally-run sites in the city.
Parson insisted Friday the growing focus on Kansas City and St. Louis had always been planned and that his administration always anticipated that reaching urban areas would pose additional challenges. He argued the size of the cities themselves complicated vaccination efforts.
“We knew all along with the limited number (of doses) we had in the beginning that it was going to be very difficult to keep it evenly across the state of Missouri and to be as diverse as we could across the state. We also, everyone needs to realize, when it comes to St. Louis and Kansas City, it is going to be a longer process simply because of the populations are so large,” Parson said.
“But as we able to move vaccine, we’re able to put more vaccine in these cities,” he added. “This was the plan we had in place from day one and knew these things would be occurring and why we’re able to do the mega-vaccine here today.”
But the events — a similar “mega-vaccination” is planned in St. Louis next week — follow weeks of local outrage over Parson’s approach, with reports that city residents on waiting lists were driving hours to reach mass vaccination sites, where demand was lower and doses were frequently left over, records show. Lawmakers fielded frantic calls from constituents. Lucas sought help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Lucas, who is weighing a Democratic bid for U.S. Senate after Sen. Roy Blunt announced he won’t run for re-election, said Thursday the event at Arrowhead was overdue but welcome.
“What I would ask is how can we get consistent events long-term?” Lucas said. “How can we set up the kind of mass vaccination opportunities or mega vaccination opportunities … that you’ve seen in other American cities.”
He added: “And I’m not even looking all around America. I want us to be as good as KCK.”
In Wyandotte County, including Kansas City, Kansas, residents 65 and older can get vaccines on a walk-in basis.
Changing approach
As the Arrowhead event got underway, Uniting Missouri PAC, a pro-Parson group, released an an ad praising the governor’s COVID-19 record while slamming New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo over his state’s unemployment rate and his administration’s efforts to hide the true number of nursing home deaths in the state. Uniting Missouri chairman John Hancock said in a statement the group released the ad “to point out the blatant bias in the media when it comes to how states responded to COVID.”
Parson has repeatedly defended his “balanced approach” to pandemic response that included no statewide mask mandates or business restrictions. In recent weeks he has touted a stronger than expected economic recovery.
Early in the vaccination rollout, the Parson administration doled out limited vaccine supplies by giving each of the state’s nine Highway Patrol regions (the one that includes Kansas City spans 13 counties) the same share as its percentage of the state’s population.
A formula further divided up doses, with a majority going to high-capacity hospital systems in the regions’ cities while the Missouri National Guard held mass vaccination events in rural areas.
Parson spent the past month and a half defending the rollout as fair, when viewed through the share of doses each Highway Patrol region got.
But in recent days, as the state has projected receiving triple its current weekly doses by the first week of April, the governor has turned his attention toward “higher vaccine demand” in urban areas and hinted that more mass vaccination events are coming to the city.
Local officials say they will be sorely needed. The Arrowhead event “will not eliminate the vaccination gap in Jackson County,” said Jackson County Health Department spokeswoman Mariah Cox.
Kansas City and Jackson County’s vaccination rates sit at 19%, behind the state’s average of 21%.
Those getting shots at the event are coming off the county’s waiting list, which is about 112,000 residents deep, Cox said. The majority are senior citizens and those with pre-existing conditions, who became eligible under the priority tier that started two months ago, on Jan. 18.
In its latest report this week, Deloitte, a consulting company hired by Missouri to track vaccination efforts, found Jackson County remains among the state’s most “mobile,” meaning a large number of residents are traveling to other counties for shots.
It has the second highest number of eligible residents still unvaccinated, and those residents make up a disproportionate share of all eligible residents statewide.
“To suggest that our vaccination process in Missouri has worked in a fair and equitable way is to have blinders on,” Lucas has said in the past.
Jackson County Executive Frank White thanked Parson on Friday for making the Arrowhead event possible. He noted it was the first time buses had been used to take people to mass vaccination sites.
“This weekend’s mega-vaccination event is essential to the safety our of residents, who need and deserve it. This is especially true for our communities of color, who have been devastated by this dangerous and deadly disease,” White said.
‘It’s not an indictment of anything’
As Parson insisted the state’s distribution was equitable, the state’s consultants were pointing out gaps. In early February, Deloitte found growing vaccine deserts in Kansas City and St. Louis — where residents were far from vaccine access.
Criticism grew throughout February from angry residents and lawmakers, and from local health officials, who said large hospital systems — as opposed to mass vaccination events or public health departments — were an inefficient way to distribute vaccine in underserved communities.
In late February, the state announced that as supplies increased, there would be two mass events in the Kansas City region each week, and three in the St. Louis area.
State officials say they didn’t change their strategy in response to criticism.
“When we broaden [distribution methods] it’s not an indictment of anything that anybody’s been doing,” Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services Director Randall Williams said on March 4, when asked about the state’s decision to hold more mass vaccination events in the cities, and shift some share of vaccines away from hospitals and toward local health departments.
In early March, the state began telling vaccine providers the statewide allocation model would shift, from being based on pure population to the population of eligible, still-unvaccinated people in each region. That change will take place March 29.
In a call with vaccination providers this week, state officials defended the initial use of pure population numbers. Doing so allowed the state to determine that every region had the “operational capacity” to vaccinate a large number of people, said Ted Delicath of the McChrystal Group, a firm advising the state’s vaccine rollout.
“We wanted to make sure in proportion to the population … that citizens were seeing the effects, the life-changing effects of these vaccines,” he said. “We were trying to make sure every citizen had the chance to see these impacts.”
In the first week of March, the state also dedicated 15% of its vaccine supplies toward “vaccine desert mitigation,” the same week Lucas sent a letter to the federal government asking FEMA to step in and provide vaccine events in the city.
On Thursday, Parson revealed the state has been in talks with FEMA “since late January” to hold mass events in Kansas City and St. Louis. The state is still working on those plans, he said.
He said Lucas’ letter played no role in that effort.
“Long before that letter was taking place we were talking to FEMA,” he said, adding, “This has been an ongoing conversation we’ve had with them for some time.”
Lucas told The Star he thought city leaders’ myriad strategies helped bring attention to the need in both Kansas City and St. Louis. He said he had a meeting set for Wednesday with FEMA’s regional administrator but had to reschedule because of a long City Council committee meeting.
“I do think our advocacy made a difference,” Lucas said. “I do think that we’ll continue to advocate for the best interests of the people of Kansas City.”
This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 1:28 PM.
