'Frustration and stress': State officials questioned monkeypox vaccine rollout

Federal officials are not relying on an established system to distribute the vaccine, slowing vaccinations and burdening local health departments, according to reviews.

About 5,000 doses of monkeypox vaccine destined for Fort Lauderdale, Florida left the national stockpile warehouse at Olive Branch, Florida. Mississippi, July 19. They kind of ended up in Oklahoma.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Then Tennessee. Then the Mississippi again. Then, finally, Florida.

In Idaho, a shipment of 60 vaccine doses went missing and turned up six days later, chilled rather than frozen, according to needs. Another 800 doses sent to Minnesota - a significant portion of the state's total allocation - were unusable because the shipment was lost in transit for longer than the 96-hour "viability window".

The federal government's distribution of the monkeypox vaccine has been marred by error and confusion, overwhelming local officials and slowing the pace of vaccinations even as the virus spreads. is spreading, according to interviews with state health officials and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Officials in at least 20 states and jurisdictions complained about the delivery of the vaccine, called Jynneos. (More than half are led by Democrats, including California, Washington, Connecticut and Michigan, suggesting their grievances are not politically motivated.)

"It's happening everywhere," said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, a nonprofit group that represents state, local, and territorial authorities. state and local responders,” she added. Ms Hannan said she had never "seen this level of frustration and stress".

In previous emergencies, including the swine flu outbreak in 2009 and the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines were delivered to healthcare providers through a system operated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This system , called VTrckS (pronounced "vee-tracks"), routinely moves billions of vaccine doses for annual vaccinations and, most importantly, is integrated into state databases that track vaccinations and doses.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">But Jynneos is disbursed from national strategic stock by another government agency under the Ministry of Health and Human Services. This agency has never been set up to take open orders, arrange deliveries from stock, track shipments, or integrate with government systems.

Instead, the stockpile was designed to deliver massive amounts of vaccine to each state in response to a catastrophic event, according to a federal official with knowledge of the stockpile's operations.

"If this was a smallpox response, they won't be sitting in their offices ordering vaccines," the state health official said. The stock is meant to "push product - it's not an order-based system," the manager added. just five sites in every state, regardless of size. State officials have to distribute the doses, manually track them, and enter the data into their databases, which would not have been necessary under the C.D.C. system.

Until recently, Jynneos orders had to be placed via email instead of an automated system, and state officials often did not know where their deliveries were or if they had been sent .

Some containers arrived without labels indicating that they contained vaccines or that they needed to be kept cold. Some were only found after several emails and phone calls. Jynneos doses arrived in the middle of the night.

"We had no way of tracking vaccine shipments, when they were actually shipped or when they were going happen," Chris Van Deusen, director of media relations at the Texas Department of State Health Services, said in an email. "They just showed up without notice."