Opinion: States and hospitals: overhaul your vaccine plans with data before it’s too late
The first phase of the vaccine rollout, which is supposed to deliver shots to roughly 24 million health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, has been stymied by poorly conceived distribution plans based on judgement calls. Without better use of sound science and data, vaccine plans for the next two phases of the rollout, which aim to inoculate nearly 180 million Americans, could descend into complete chaos.
Most of the missteps so far stem from the same problem: prioritization decisions that ignore the science of risk assessment and leave too much to chance. From Stanford Medical Center’s reliance on a simplistic and arbitrary distribution plan that kicked front-line health care workers to the back of the line, to Massachusetts General Hospital’s use of an app that relied on workers to self-report their level of risk, to an Arizona county’s misplaced trust in a survey issued to health care workers, we’ve seen that the people who need the vaccine the most tend to get left behind when allocation decisions are made by faulty risk models or are up to the discretion of a handful of individuals, despite their best intentions.
