The Health 202: More than four in 10 coronavirus vaccine recipients are seniors

“Those who were dying in large numbers over the past year are now on a path to protection,” said Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House coronavirus response team, adding it’s “a testament to a society that has put our parents and grandparents … first.”

That’s out of more than 40 million doses administered in the United States so far, Slavitt said.

More than 3.7 million of them are residents of long-term-care facilities, who, along with their caregivers and health-care workers, were prioritized by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory panel to get the shots first in what’s known as Phase 1A.

Many of the others are at least 75 years old and part of Phase 1B — a group that also includes front-line workers.

Under CDC recommendations, people in this age group wouldn’t qualify for the vaccines until tier 1C (although the Biden administration has urged states to make anyone 65 and older eligible).

States don’t have to follow the recommendations of the CDC panel. Most did adhere closely to the 1A recommendations to vaccinate nursing home residents and staff first. But state guidance started diverging when it came to determining who should be in the next priority groups, 1B and 1C, according to a tally by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

For example, some states expanded 1B to include people as young as 65 or 70 or people even younger with preexisting conditions. Others more narrowly defined who qualifies as an essential front-line worker for that phase, prioritizing teachers or first responders.

And most states are still limiting vaccinations to people considered to be in the 1B group. Just four — Alabama, Colorado, Maryland and Michigan — have moved on to their 1C groups, according to KFF.

All told, 29 states and D.C. have expanded eligibility to include all seniors. In some states, it’s because they included people 65 and older in tier 1B. In other states, it’s because they’ve moved on to tier 1C.

People 65 and older have accounted for more than 80 percent of covid-19 deaths, even though they’re 16 percent of the U.S. population.

While some ethicists have argued for prioritizing essential workers who, unlike many seniors, are more likely to catch the virus and spread it, others say the best and simplest way to approach immunizations is by focusing primarily on age.

“By simplifying vaccine prioritization to focus on people 65 and older across the nation, we can more effectively protect most Americans at the highest risk of dying in each ethnic and racial demographic in a way that focusing on essential workers would not,” bioethicists Ruth R. Faden, Matthew A. Crane and Saad B. Omer wrote in a recent op-ed for The Post.

It’s no surprise West Virginia is leading on vaccinating people 65 and older — that’s a reflection of the state’s markedly successful immunization program (we wrote about that program last week). Thirty-four percent of West Virginians in this age group have received at least one dose of the vaccine. 

Other states — including Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota — have vaccinated fewer than 20 percent of their seniors.

And while seniors certainly have had more access to vaccines than younger people, they still make up fewer than half of all vaccinations in all but three states: Florida, North Carolina and Mississippi. That’s likely because a large share of the initial doses was given to long-term-care staff and health-care workers.

“The federal government allocated too much vaccine to elder-care facilities, and many states are now redistributing hundreds of thousands of the unused doses to others — a move expected to expand vaccinations to more people, more quickly,” Lena and Lenny write. 

There were excess allocations to long-term-care facilities because the federal government based them on the number of facility beds — not the actual number of residents. Additionally, facility staff turned out to be far less willing than expected to be vaccinated, and it was discovered that six doses could be extracted from vials instead of five.

The CDC is working with 32 jurisdictions on a case-by-case basis to “transfer doses back from pharmacy partners when there is an excess,” spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told Lena and Lenny. She declined to say how many total doses are being redirected.

“The program is still ongoing, with vaccination wrapping up in skilled-nursing facilities and ongoing in assisted-living facilities … so there is no way at this time to know exactly how many doses are still needed to complete vaccination at the remaining facilities,” she said.

The removals will include takedowns of posts asserting that vaccines cause autism or that it is safer for people to contract the novel coronavirus than to receive the vaccinations.

“The social network has increasingly changed its content policies over the past year as the coronavirus has surged. In October, the social network prohibited people and companies from purchasing advertising that included false or misleading information about vaccines. In December, Facebook said it would remove posts with claims that had been debunked by the World Health Organization or government agencies,” the New York Times’s Mike Isaac reports.

Facebook’s latest move goes further, targeting unpaid posts, pages and groups that repeatedly publish misinformation around all vaccines, not just ones targeting the coronavirus.. Previously, Facebook has pushed misleading content lower down on people’s News Feeds, but now it will remove such posts entirely. Facebook said it consulted with the World Health Organization and other health institutes to determine a list of common false or misleading claims.

The company said that the move came in response to a recent ruling from the Facebook Oversight board, an independent body that reviews Facebook’s policy decisions. Facebook also said it would give $120 million in advertising credits to health ministries, nongovernmental organizations and United Nations agencies to spread reliable health information.

Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who writes about health and technology, raised some concerns about Facebook’s list of claims that could be removed:

Others praised the decision. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.):

“As friends, family, and many of his constituents will know, Ron maintained his quick wit and optimism until the very end. Despite years of painful, sometimes debilitating treatment for cancer, Ron never lacked the desire to get up and go to work, to motivate those around him, or to offer fatherly advice,” his office said.

Wright’s death will create the fifth special House election of the year. Another special election is being held in the 5th district of Louisiana after congressman-elect Luke Letlow (R) died of the coronavirus before taking office. 

Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, released new allegations that Trump political appointees meddled in scientists’ work.

“Clyburn’s latest allegations focus on emails sent last year by then-scientific adviser Paul Alexander, a Trump appointee who repeatedly clashed with career scientists — and called for deliberately infecting younger Americans with the virus, arguing that it would speed ‘herd immunity’ — before being fired in September. Alexander did not immediately respond to an email request for comment,” The Post’s Dan Diamond reports.

In one email, Alexander defended a controversial CDC decision to revise its guidelines to no longer require testing of asymptomatic individuals who had close contact with infected people. Other emails show Alexander pushing for greater access to hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug touted by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite evidence it was ineffective. 

“In his letter to HHS, Clyburn calls for documents sent by at least 46 current and former health department officials, ranging from Trump appointees like former HHS secretary Alex Azar, to career civil servants working on the coronavirus response. The Trump administration last year mostly limited its document releases to emails sent by Alexander, said a subcommittee aide familiar with the probe,” Dan writes. 

In a brief interview with The Post on Monday, Rochelle Walensky said that a “vast minority” of the public health agency’s pandemic response guidelines had been “politically swayed” by former president Donald Trump’s appointees. Walensky said that Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director and a career civil servant, will lead a review of those policies, which will also provide the agency an opportunity to insert additional scientific findings, Lena reports.

“Asked whether she is frustrated that some states are beginning to ease restrictions on indoor dining and lift mask mandates even though coronavirus caseloads remain high, Walensky said: ‘It’s not for me to emote about it because my whole purpose here is to improve the health of the public,’ ” Lena writes.

Walensky added: “We are not functioning as a normal society. Our children are not being schooled the way they should be. Our businesses are not thriving. People are working from home. Social things that we used to enjoy are not happening. And all of that is because there’s still a huge amount of disease out there.”

“An executive action issued by President Biden in January directs the Department of Labor to clarify federal rules so that workers who refuse to go to unsafe workplaces will be more likely to be granted unemployment insurance,” The Post’s Eli Rosenberg and Hannah Knowles report. “A White House official said the Department of Labor’s guidance will clarify what qualifies as an unsafe workplace.”

Some 80 percent of the than 1.5 million people who quit working voluntarily last year and filed for unemployment insurance had their claims denied. Another 75,000 people applied for unemployment insurance after being laid off and declining to return to work; nearly half had their claims denied.

Experts caution the executive order’s influence will depend on a number of factors, including the definition of “unsafe workplaces” and complicated dynamics between state and federal unemployment law. It also appears to only help workers who are already unemployed or who turn down return-to-work offers. 

• Some inmate advocates blame a weekend uprising at a St. Louis jail on desperate conditions amid the coronavirus pandemic, including failures in safety standards and inmates being left in de facto solitary confinement, Eric Berger and Mark Berman write for The Post. 

• House Democrats proposed sending $1,400 stimulus payments to Americans with up to $75,000 in annual income, rejecting an earlier plan that would have sharply curtailed the benefits, The Post’s Jeff Stein and Erica Werner report.
   
• Heart surgeries plummeted by 53 percent during the pandemic, according to a finding presented in a January meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. The adult cardiac surgery volume fell to roughly 12,000 surgeries a month, Linda Searing writes for The Post.