Atlanta Magazine

How chronic underfunding fueled
Georgia’s Covid-19 vaccine woes

Advocates warn federal support doesn’t offer a permanent solution,
nor will it ease chronic understaffing

 

An emergency room nurse in Savannah receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020. PHOTOGRAPH BY SEAN RAYFORD/GETTY IMAGES

BY
JANUARY 26, 2021
 

When Amber Schmidtke was a medical school professor in Macon, she started a research project to better understand why so many of the state’s kids were behind on their childhood immunizations. In 2017, Georgia was the slowest state in the nation to get three-year-olds fully vaccinated against infections like measles and whooping cough. Schmidtke found that a major reason for the state’s poor performance was the Georgia Registry of Immunization Transactions and Services—abbreviated, obviously, as GRITS.

Created in 1996, GRITS was initially designed to ensure children statewide were benefiting from federal vaccination programs by tracking immunizations given mostly in pediatricians’ offices and by county health departments. It was built for “more of a trickle than a flood,” says Schmitdke, and was so infrequently used to track adult vaccinations that most internists had no clue how to use it.

Schmidtke wasn’t particularly surprised, then, to hear that during the state’s massive Covid-19 vaccination rollout effort, GRITS had become a particularly gluey cog in the public health machine, its crashes and delays leading to dramatically underreported levels of vaccine administration statewide. But she was stunned when, during a January 19 hearing before the Georgia legislature, health department director Kathleen Toomey requested only minimal additional funding for public health in the 2022 budget.

GPB News

 

Georgia’s Slow COVID Vaccine Rollout Exposes Broad Public Health Shortfall

Tammi Brown, Chatham County Health Department Nurse Manager, was among the first in Georgia to receive the vaccine against COVID-19 on December 15, 2020 as Memorial University Medical Center emergency room nurse David Wilson awaits another dose and Gov. Brian Kemp and State Sen. Ben Watson look on.

By: Ross Williams

The Georgia Department of Public Health is working to get COVID-19 vaccines in the arms of eligible Georgians, but employees there do not get a break from the work they had before the pandemic.

That’s what Democratic state Sen. Michelle Au, a physician from Johns Creek, found out as she was helping vaccinate people in Norcross for the health department on a recent weekend.

“You see how much else they also have to do, and it was Saturday, so they didn’t have quite the volume for that kind of thing, but they’re handling stuff for WIC, the women and children’s food program, they’re handling other vaccines, all the childhood vaccines are in that same fridge, essentially, trying to be delivered,” she said.

“So there’s all these elements of the public health structure that are supposed to be running under non-pandemic circumstances that they do an admirable job of handling but are still under-resourced, and now we’re piling this huge task on top of it,” Au added.

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WSB-TV

We need you!
State looking for volunteers to help speed up COVID-19 vaccinations across GA

By Matt Johnson, WSB-TV
January 15, 2021 at 11:26 pm EST

ATLANTA — We’ve been reporting all week about how the state of Georgia has had one of the slowest roll out rates when it comes to people getting the COVID-19 vaccine in the Peach State.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks Georgia at 49 out of the 50 states at rate of vaccination – only ahead of Alabama.

As of Friday, 5,584 people remained hospitalized from the virus across the state. That makes up roughly 32.5% of all the state’s patients. The state says about 91% of all the available hospital beds in Georgia are currently in use because of the rise in COVID-19 cases.

WATCH

Pre-Session Town Hall: Legislative Priorities, Community Concerns

With State Representative Angelika Kausche

 

WATCH NOW