OAHHS Hospital Voice Spring/Summer 2021

26 » A magazine for and about Oregon Community Hospitals. someone to get the vaccine. I think that has been the trigger in some of the new cases, especially in some of the rural Oregon coun- ties people saying I saw this com- munity member get sick or I heard about a pastor that got sick. That drove them to get vaccinated. Unfortunately, that may still hap- pen in some areas where the vac- cine rate is really low. There are some really smart targeted efforts in a lot of places, working with employers for example. How important are some of these partners, hospitals, and other organizations, in this effort? They’ve been super important and a lynchpin of the vaccination effort in Oregon. I see it as a three-legged stool going forward. We’ve got community partners that have either a trusted voice or a group they work with providing funding to community-based organizations to get out there to partner with the second leg of the stool which is the vaccinator, whether it’s a hospital employee or a pharmacist or doctor, you have to find somebody to put the needle into arms, and we’ve broadened eligibility for who can do it, but having people connected there, and the third part is where people work or where people play or go to shop, that third leg of how to get people vaccinated it’s getting all parties to play a role going forward. The roles that hospitals played in stepping up in vaccinating beyond just their employees in their local communities, to say, “You know what, the state needs us now, and we are going to take a risk and set up these things that we don’t know how we’re going to get paid for, we don’t know exactly how they’re going to happen,” but they have been really successful in keeping the state going in this vaccination effort. There were so many unknowns at the beginning, so your job was very difficult, there were questions about supply and efficacy, how did that affect where you sent doses? The beginning was really tough, people figuring out how to man- age a new product, the setup, how the filling the vials would work, all that goes into managing a new vaccine or a new drug, there was just so much pressure right at the very beginning, that was as diffi- cult thing to manage. The pieces of trying to not only manage the supply but managing the demand, in the different eligi- bility categories, was really diffi- cult. And looking back there will be a lot of medical ethicists who look at how we did the rollout even according to the CDC catego- ries 1a, and 1b, and of course try- ing to get health care workers vaccinated, but I think there is a lot of thinking and questions about where to go. And I think some of us wish that we would have had more community guid- ance and the Vaccine Advisory Committee should have started earlier than it did. Looking back, we should have had that going in the fall and really ready to go and having thoughtful guidance about getting vaccine to all Oregonians and all populations of Oregonians. I think all states suffered from some of the same concerns, but it is one thing that we definitely could have done better. You may have also thought it would be great to have a connected, well-funded public health infrastructure, and I can just get the supply and plug it in. But that’s not how we set up public health in this country. I think you’ve hit on the dis- jointed nature of the public health system; the pandemic has shown where there are very, very strong disconnects. There were thought- ful plans and preparedness exer- cises done between hospitals and health systems and local public health and you saw where those were strong you saw some benefit in how the pandemic response rolled out in a certain county. But, even if you take a step back, that there’s not a national system that we are all part of that is able to say who is and who isn’t vacci- nated, is pretty absurd when you think about it. It comes to me that some of the hard ways that impacted the vac- cine rollout is that insurers have records, the state has records, coordinated care organizations have records, but not all together. So that interconnectedness of