San Antonio Express-News: Texas representative leads congressional hearing into COVID vaccine rollout
As the United States surpasses half a million COVID-19 deaths and a third vaccine could start reaching states next week, lawmakers heard testimony on how the vaccine rollout has faltered.
One of the biggest problems, according to expert witnesses, is the stark inequity in where the shots are being distributed, often overlooking communities of color.
"In my part of Texas, we are still not where we need to be," U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett said Friday in his opening remarks as chairman of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. "We know that more deaths and illnesses are on the way until we get more vaccinated."
The subcommittee held a three-hour hearing on the vaccine rollout that was streamed live on YouTube.
Doggett, a Democrat who represents part of Bexar County, noted that not all front-line health care workers have had access to the COVID-19 vaccine, people are waiting for hours on the phone trying to secure an appointment and state-designated mass vaccination sites called "hubs" are in wealthier areas.
"The rollout has been disappointingly slow and states were largely unprepared with no concrete plans for implementation," said Dr. Ashish Jha, a physician and dean of Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, R.I. "The distribution has hardly been even, and half of the states are not reporting who is getting vaccines and who is not. We must do better at collecting and publicizing this data."
Jha said poor health data makes it hard to see whether efforts to each Black and Latino communities are working.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of American Public Health Association, said that based on the limited data that was available on vaccinations, "we're still seeing troubling trends and disparities."
Benjamin said aside from there being hesitancy to get vaccinated in some communities of color, there are many barriers to access, including not having a computer, Wi-Fi and broadband internet.
Many states do not have a single point of entry, he said, which can be frustrating for people having to check multiple places in the quest to get vaccinated.
"We just don't have enough telephone-based appointment systems," he said. In addition, "we need to make sure these appointments are available in the evenings and weekends, especially for our essential workers."
Dr. Kimberly Avila Edwards, an Austin pediatrician and director of advocacy at Ascension Seton, said a "national blueprint" is needed for vaccination efforts.
Dr. Reshma Ramachandran, national clinicians scholar at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., said another issue is the lack of transparency and accountability from vaccine manufacturers who received billions of dollars in taxpayer funds for COVID-19 research and vaccine development.
The physician testified that while upfront spending was necessary, no comprehensive database of expenditures exists.
"It's unclear who owns this publicly funded technology," she said. "These manufacturers and the U.S. government have left the American public in the dark on how their taxpayer dollars are being spent and whether access to these vaccines will be guaranteed."
She expressed support for the Taxpayer Research and Coronavirus Knowledge Act or TRACK Act introduced by Doggett this congressional session. If passed, the bill would create a user-friendly database to monitor federal funds spent on vaccines.