As South Florida hospitals cancel vaccines, is the state shifting distribution plans?

Florida’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts will shift away from hospital-run sites and toward pharmacies and county-run operations, according to one of the state’s top hospital officials — a change that may explain recent scarcity of appointments and in some cases, total cancellations.

According to Mary Mayhew, CEO of the Florida Hospital Association and the former secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s hospitals have been told they are not likely to receive more first-dose vaccines as the state maximizes the role of retail pharmacies like Publix and prioritizes government-run sites.

“At this point, the state has moved to prioritize a county-based approach, using their county health departments, and maximizing the role of retail pharmacies such as those in Publix, CVS and Walgreens,” Mayhew told the Miami Herald in an interview Wednesday night. “Hospitals are actually rolling back those operations.”

Baptist Health announced Tuesday that it was canceling all first-dose appointments after Wednesday and Mount Sinai on Miami Beach said Thursday that it was canceling all appointments after Friday. Both hospital systems cited lack of certainty on vaccine supply for the cancellations.

Second-dose appointments are not affected, as required by the vaccine’s emergency use authorization.

Mayhew said hospitals have been told that as the state expands pharmacy and county-run sites, “they are not likely to see any additional allocations of first doses with some rare exceptions.”

“That is largely where the state is headed and the direction they have provided to us,” she said.

A spokesman for the state’s Division of Emergency Management, which oversees the vaccine distribution for the state, did not respond to requests for comment.

The news comes after the announcements by Baptist and Mount Sinai, and as Gov. Ron DeSantis crisscrosses the state to announce new Publix pharmacy partnerships. The vaccine will soon be available in 242 stores in 18 of the state’s 67 counties. In South Florida, Publix stores in Palm Beach and Monroe Counties are included. Miami-Dade and Broward Counties are not yet on the list.

Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, which announced Thursday it was canceling all vaccine appointments after Friday, declined an interview with the Miami Herald, but said in a press release that the hospital encourages those whose appointments were canceled to seek out pharmacy or government-run options.

“It is anticipated that those vaccination locations will become the primary means of large-scale distribution moving forward,” they wrote.

Spokespeople at Baptist, Jackson and Broward Health would not answer questions about whether the state is shifting its distribution plan toward pharmacies and counties and away from hospitals.

The ongoing supply problem

Mayhew said the root of the problems hospitals faced with rolling out the vaccine was the disconnect between “good planning and logistics” necessary to get people scheduled “against a backdrop of limited notice from the federal government.”

According to DEM Director Jared Moskowitz, the federal allotments for each week are only given to states with six days notice. That left very little time for the state to know how much was coming and how much it could allocate to different parts of the state. It also left hospitals scrambling to schedule highly sought-after vaccine appointments.

The vaccine supply allocated to states from the federal level has also decreased in recent weeks, which puts the states in a bind when it comes to county allocations. After they earmark doses for long-term care facilities and pharmacy programs, the rest must be divided among the 67 counties.

The state Department of Health has reported that Florida had provided 1,183,012 people with COVID-19 vaccinations as of Wednesday. More than 2.5 million doses have been sent to Florida, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The lack of notice — and lack of vaccines — from the federal government has created a strain on Florida’s rollout in the last several weeks.

““It’s difficult to achieve the goal of efficient, effective and urgent deployment of the vaccine without the opportunity to schedule appointments out several days,” Mayhew said Wednesday.

When Baptist Health canceled its appointments earlier this week, it cited “no promise of a stable supply” in the future. Mount Sinai, which scheduled appointments as late as the first week in March, had a similar statement.

It’s not clear whether other hospitals that have scheduled patients weeks and months ahead of time have also canceled appointments or plan to. Jackson Health System has not scheduled patients weeks or months out, but instead schedules smaller amounts of appointments in shorter bursts when it knows how many doses it will have to administer in a given week.