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Update on COVID-19 vaccine in Georgia
Georgia state health officials give an update on the coronavirus vaccine distribution.
ATLANTA - They are the Georgians who face the most risk from COVID-19 and soon, the state plans to offer coronavirus vaccines to anyone over 65 years old, as well as police officers and firefighters within the next two weeks.
"We're going to do everything in our power to get it administered as quickly as we can to the people that need it," Gov. Brian Kemp said at a news conference Thursday.
Right now, only healthcare workers and those who live or work in long-term care facilities are eligible to receive the vaccine.
The governor and Georgia Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey said they made the decision to expand the phase one criteria to include those groups after learning that some rural communities had a surplus.
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"Sadly, we are not getting the kind of uptake of vaccine by healthcare workers all over the state," Dr. Toomey explained. "By contrast, here in metro Atlanta there is still a waiting list of hundreds of health care workers waiting to get vaccinated, but in many parts of rural Georgia, both in the north and the south, there is vaccine available and literally sitting in freezers. That's unacceptable. We have lives to save."
State officials said they considered redistributing some of the vaccines to higher-demand parts of the state but that would be a slow process.
"By the time we tried to do all the logistical things to move the vaccine around, we'll have new vaccine. So, really it's not worth it," said Gov. Kemp. "We're better off just getting that vaccine to people on the ground today, in the next couple of days versus trying to move it and it be five or six more days and we have other vaccine coming in."
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According to the DPH online vaccine dashboard, as of December 30, the state had received more than 375,000 doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. So far, only 61,870 Georgians have gotten vaccinated.
"There [are] a couple of issues. One is the 'vaccines delivered' is always a day or two behind because we only know what people have entered into the vaccine reporting system and so we know we've delivered more vaccine into people's arms than we actually have reported," said Dr. Toomey.
State officials said they hope to set up large-scale drive-up vaccination sites that can accommodate thousands of people per day. They plan to release more details about how people can sign up for appointments in the coming days.
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