Hospitals Race to Set Vaccine Priorities for Health-Care Workers

Hospitals Race to Set Vaccine Priorities for Health-Care Workers Large hospital systems are grappling with how best to decide which health-care workers will be vaccinated first for Covid-19, a daunting task when it’s unclear which shots they’ll get, how many and when they’ll arrive. Angelica LaVito Bloomberg.com

Large hospital systems are grappling with how best to decide which health-care workers will be vaccinated first for Covid-19, a daunting task when it’s unclear which shots they’ll get, how many and when they’ll arrive.

The first Covid-19 vaccine could be cleared for U.S. use as soon as next month, with Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s candidate already under review and Moderna Inc.’s shot not far behind. Federal officials, meanwhile, have signaled that health-care workers and older Americans at high risk should be vaccinated as step one in what could set off months of fraught decisions involving other key priority groups.

But following those initial guidelines could prove difficult. With 21 million health-care workers in the U.S., there almost certainly won’t be enough doses to reach them all at once. That’s forcing hospitals to categorize their workers based on best-guess distribution estimates, a task made even more complex for some systems by a patchwork state-by-state approach.

Minnesota’s Allina Health system, which employs 15,600 workers who have direct contact with patients in Minnesota and Wisconsin, is estimating it could get 3,000 to 4,000 doses initially. The plan: Prioritize those that interact directly with coronavirus patients by listing each worker by their job type and the units they work in....

Health systems that operate across state lines face an even bigger challenge. While states are taking cues from federal guidelines, they are developing their own priority lists, creating a situation where some employees in one state might get vaccinated before their peers in another. ...