OAHHS Hospital Voice Spring/Summer 2021

23 Spring/Summer 2021 In managing the vaccine rollout, Baden oversees a program that has administered over four mil- lion doses. We spoke to Baden as Oregon moved closer to Governor Brown’s target of vaccinating 70 percent of those 18 and older. What have been the biggest challenges for the rollout? It’s amazing to think we are six months since the first vaccines have arrived in the state, and the amazing feat of science and engi- neering to get to this point. As we all talked about how long it usually takes for a vaccine to be developed in the normal process, and the eggs it takes to develop a flu vaccine, and you can see the power of technology and the power of engineering and ingenu- ity to get the vaccines to this point, with a lot more money than normally gets put into developing a vaccine. The biggest challenges of the roll- out probably have changed throughout the rollout, having a product that has extraordinarily high demand while supply is scarce is difficult to manage for all of us. And for our health care sys- tem partners, for the Oregon Health Authority, for those that wanted it, I would have loved to open up the full vaccine spigot on January 1, we weren’t able to do that. We weren’t able to do that on February 1, we haven’t been able to do that really until now (early June) where the supply and demand quotient has shifted. And that has been a really big chal- lenge of the rollout. I think at the beginning, espe- cially for our hospital partners that really stepped up, under- standing the storage and the pharmacy and the administration of this product, of a two-dose vac- cine, was underappreciated going into this. Having something that needed ultra-cold storage, how to turn that on a daily basis, that was not something a hospital nor- mally deals with. I think just get- ting used to that was definitely a challenge in the rollout. And looking back at the last six months, I think the piece that we would have thought about and done differently and been better prepared for was a better equita- ble distribution of the vaccine that got to all Oregonians regard- less of economic status, regardless of whether they were a Black or a Brown Oregonian, the impact of the pandemic on communities of color and where the pandemic raged most in Oregon and across the country were in those commu- nities. And we did not do a good enough job to assure that there was access from the very begin- ning to those communities. How were the allocation decisions made? This is definitely one that evolved over the first few months of the response. At first, where vaccines were initially headed to was health care settings and hospitals to vaccinate frontline heroes in the healthcare infrastructure of the state. There were surveys done on which to base that data. I think from there is where it got more complicated, because hospi- tals and health systems that piv- oted from vaccinating their own staff—which may be challenging, but is way less challenging than operating a large, very high through-put mass vaccination site—that pivot changed how the weekly allocations were done. It started with our weekly alloca- tions with where we could get doses in arms. That led to doses not going in a consistent fashion in January and February across the state, it really went to places that had the capacity to move doses in arms quickly. So, when we got into February, we all knew that we had to fix that, and we moved a little bit more into assur- ing that we had doses moving across the state. Because as we got into February, more and more continues  It’s amazing to think we are six months since the first vaccines have arrived in the state, and the amazing feat of science and engineering to get to this point. Dave Baden, OHA Chief Financial Officer