Frontline workers waited in line to receive the Covid-19 vaccine at a hospital in Arlington, Va., last month. At a handful of large medical centers, employees who are not involved in patient care have been given shots. A 20-something who works on computers. A young researcher who studies cancer. Technicians in basic research labs.
But a handful of the nation’s most prestigious academic hospitals have already taken the notion much further. Workers who have nothing to do with patient care, and who are not 75 or older, have been offered the shots. Some of the institutions were among the first recipients of the limited supplies in the United States.
On Jan. 6, the medical center announced plans to begin vaccinating its high-risk patients, but only after it had “administered the initial vaccine dose to well over 15,000 people working at the medical center,” according to an email it sent to its patients. In Boston, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, both affiliated with Harvard University, have immunized more than 34,000 employees, including those involved in patient care, researchers who may come in contact with coronavirus samples and those engaged in clinical trials, according to Rich Copp, a spokesperson for the hospitals.
At Columbia University, word quickly spread through research labs far removed from patient care: If you showed up at Milstein Hospital, the university’s primary medical center, you could get a vaccination — never mind whether your work had anything to do with patients. At NYU’s Langone Medical Center, the outreach to staff members who have no contact with patients was more deliberate.
In a tacit admission that those employees would not otherwise qualify for the vaccine so soon, the email warned that once the state expanded the eligibility criteria, “you may have to wait weeks, if not months, to receive it based on demand and availability.” Privately, some state officials were furious. The institutions should instead have asked the state what to do next as soon as they were done immunizing front-line staff members, said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
Like you can't faking do nothing 😂
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