Lawmakers Challenge Cuomo’s Vaccination Plan For The Disabled
Opening second phase of vaccinations pushed aside health care workers and others
By Brendan Lyons Albany Times Union January 27, 2021
ALBANY — Four state lawmakers from the Capital Region are urging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to “re-prioritize” the administration of coronavirus vaccines as many health care and other essential workers — and also people with developmental disabilities who live in congregate settings — are being pushed aside after New York opened up eligibility for anyone 65 and older to be vaccinated.
The backlog has been exacerbated by confusing directives, according to county leaders, and many people have been unable to schedule vaccination appointments through the state’s inundated online portal and hotline.
The pushback from the state legislative members came after New York’s health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, issued a letter over the weekend to vaccine providers instructing them that “eligible populations must all receive a fair allocation” of vaccines, even as he said the state’s supplies have become “more and more scarce.”
“This new mandate is creating the very vaccine inequities that your original plan sought to protect against,” state Sen. Neil Breslin and assemblymembers Patricia Fahy, John McDonald and Carrie Woerner, all Democrats, wrote in their letter to Cuomo. “This new executive order declares that ‘proportional’ is ‘fair,’ yet it is not fair to our front line health care workers, emergency workers, and our most vulnerable New Yorkers to bear a proportional burden in this pandemic. We cannot call health care workers heroes one day and then deny them priority access to vaccination the next.”
Last week, the Times Union reported that thousands of disabled individuals who live in group home settings have seen their rate of vaccinations for coronavirus dwindle as the state shifted doses to mass-vaccination sites and expanded the number of individuals eligible for the shots, including people 65 and older.
Roughly 30 percent of the Capital Region’s group home population — about 11,000 disabled individuals and staff members who care for them in a 10-county region — had been vaccinated through the first five weeks of the rollout. But when the state shifted to mass-vaccination sites, including one at the University of Albany, those locations were given in some cases 50 percent or more of a region’s doses.
Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo, said the problem is not the number of people who are eligible to be vaccinated, it’s the shortage of supplies and “every shot diverted is one less shot for another group.”
“The entire issue hinges on the number of doses from the federal government,” Azzopardi said. “Health care workers and the disabled community have been the priority since the beginning and we are currently evaluating how to expand vaccinations to the disabled community beyond hospitals and if anyone has ideas on how to do that, we’ll hear them out.”
The tensions over the state’s vaccination rollout also riled Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, president of the state Association of County Executives, who wrote a letter to Zucker on Sunday urging him to reconsider not giving developmentally disabled individuals in group settings a higher prioritization.
“Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, especially those who live in group homes or in congregate care settings, face an immense risk from COVID-19,” Molinaro wrote. “These facilities continue to suffer from the ravages of this pandemic as the greatest protections we have are not always practical for many of these individuals, as some struggle to understand social distancing and have difficulty wearing masks.”
Molinaro said that population has also endured the loss of critical services during the pandemic, which he characterized as necessary for safety but “damaging.”
“Ensuring access to a vaccine is a means to not only protect this population and those that serve them, but also ensure high-quality care and services can be provided safely,” his letter stated.
That strategy has affected those who were in the first — or 1A — phase of vaccinations, because the shift was made in conjunction with adding a second phase of eligible individuals that include anyone 65 or older as well as teachers, police officers, grocery and convenience store workers and other essential workers.
In a similar letter to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last week, three leaders of groups representing the interests of disabled individuals — New York Alliance for Inclusion & Innovation, New York State Industries for the Disabled and The ARC New York — echoed those concerns that the vulnerable population they represent was being pushed aside as hospital hub systems, initially established to vaccinate the initial “1A” groups, were receiving little or no vaccine.
“With the opening of the state vaccination sites and the re-allocation of vaccine to these sites, this has reduced vaccine supply and availability for the 1A population to the point that appointments have been cancelled the latter half of this past week and through the weekend,” the groups’ letter states.
On Jan. 15, the Centers for Disability Services in Albany canceled a vaccination clinic that had been scheduled for 170 disabled individuals and their caretakers.
In recent days, Cuomo has urged county health departments, hospitals, pharmacies and other vaccine administrators not to schedule any appointments until they have received their allotted doses for the week. That shift came as he blamed the federal government for not sending enough doses to New York, where vaccination appointments are backlogged and stretching into the late spring due to low supplies.
“We prioritized this group from the very beginning,” Gareth Rhodes, a member of Cuomo’s coronavirus task force, said last week. “It’s not like we stopped prioritizing them; they are still prioritized. We just don’t have enough vaccine to go around.”