Vermont Yankee on the banks of the Connecticut River. Photo by Deborah Lazar/Special to The Commons

Entergy Corp. stock has dipped by almost a dollar per share in part because of an “impairment” in connection with the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

According to a an earnings report by the Louisiana-based company that owns Vermont’s only nuclear plant, actions by the state of Vermont to shut down the plant this year triggered quarterly evaluations by Entergy.

The company’s quarterly report shows that the Vermont Yankee asset impairment represented a $1.26 negative impact on earnings per share.

According to the company’s report, “A number of factors and inputs are used in the Vermont Yankee impairment evaluation, including the status of pending legal and state regulatory matters, as well as assumptions about future revenues and costs of the plant.”

The company is currently in litigation with the state in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Entergy and the state are appealing a lower court decision that found that two state laws requiring legislative approval for the plant to continue operating violated the U.S. Constitution.

The “impairment,” caused in part by legal wrangling with the state, does not change Entergy’s future outlook, according to its quarterly report.

“This impairment does not reflect a change in Entergy’s point of view of the economic value of the plant assuming continued operation through 2032, nor does it impact the company’s continued commitment to invest to assure safe operations of the plant, which is always the top priority,” the report states.

The report states that it also does not reflect a change in the company’s point of view on the legal and state regulatory proceedings surrounding the plant.

Entergy is also seeking a new license from the Vermont Public Service Board. Its state license expired March 21 along with its contracts with state utilities. The plant continues to operate while the proceeding continues. All the power is being sold out of state.

~Alan Panebaker

Scott scolds Senate for lack of decorum

Though Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell is the Senate leader, it’s Lt. Gov. Phil Scott who presides over the Senate Chamber.

And from his perch at the elaborate wood podium in the center of the Green Room, Scott has been the stoic arbiter of disputes in what by all accounts has been a contentious session.

But even Scott, who has been the voice of reason in the Senate, had enough on Friday morning. Senators at that point had worked through two back-to-back late nights and early morning calls. Tempers flared throughout the 12- to 14-hour floor debates. It wasn’t the first day that individual senators stood up to apologize for bad behavior.

“I want to voice my concern about the decorum of the Senate,” Scott said. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I know how frustrated, tired and irritable you are. Just because we disagree with someone reporting a bill or making a comment … or might be bored with what they say doesn’t mean we can interrupt them.”

The points of order, points of personal privilege, interruptions and amendments to amendments to amendments have been at an all-time high this year.

Scott said he tries to make points of order based on the rules of the Senate, not as a way to stifle the debate, “because I think it makes it harder in some ways.”

The debate on Thursday he said was healthy and good, but “I would ask you to remember we’re Vermonters first.”

“The Senate is a body that treats each other with respect,” Scott said. “I want to remind you of that … just remember who we are. We’re better than that.”

~Anne Galloway

Speaker says budget bill will be stripped of amendments

Speaker of the House Shap Smith Friday said he expected the budget legislation, which took on multiple unrelated amendments Thursday in the Senate, to be stripped back down in conference committee.

One Senate amendment would grant child-care providers the right to unionize and collectively bargain with state government.

“I made it clear that if [that amendment] came over on the budget, I would not be able to support it as part of the conference,” Smith said.

The lack of support, he said, is due to the way the legislation is presented, not a disagreement with its ideals.

“I believe it’s an issue of great importance for Vermonters, and I believe that should stand alone for an up or down vote or on a bill that actually deals with labor issues,” Smith said.

~Taylor Dobbs

House won’t budge on philosophical exemption

After the Senate approved a bill that would eliminate the philosophical exemption for children’s vaccines Monday, the legislation has been largely neutralized after it met resistance from the House.

The legislation was drafted in the Senate and would remove the philosophical exemption, which currently allows parents to let their children go unvaccinated if they have “philosophical convictions opposed to immunization.”

The Senate approved the bill, S.199, on Monday. The House voted to keep the exemption, which is utilized by about 350 families in the state. There are also exemptions for religion and for children with weak immune systems who are likely to have health complications from vaccines.

Rep. Michael Fisher, D-Addison, chair of the House Committee on Health Care, said the House agrees that immunization rates are a concern, but advocated a different approach.

“Given the numbers and given the level of concern,” Fisher said, “the house position is that we need to employ education and outreach.”

Sen. Kevin Mullin, who serves on the Senate Health and Welfare Committee and introduced the bill in the Senate, said public health should prevail.

Mullin said the House is “bending over backwards” to accommodate the concerns of the 350 families who use the exemption, and that the Senate was “amazed” public good doesn’t win out.

Fisher said the House has compromised on the issue, adding language that would suspend the philosophical exemption if immunization rates for certain diseases fell below 90 percent statewide. Senators advocated for school or school-district level monitoring and suspension, but the the House would not accept that plan.

“It’s the Senate’s turn to make a proposal or accept the house idea,” Fisher said in an interview.

It seems senators are taking the latter path; the conference committee is set to meet again Monday to discuss the House’s changes to a working group tasked by the legislation with studying how to best protect “immunocompromised students” who are put at risk by unvaccinated peers.

~Taylor Dobbs

Senate passes search and rescue study bill

The Vermont Senate today passed a version of a search and rescue reform bill that was developed by Sen. Vince Illuzzi, R/D-Essex-Orleans, in the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs. The Senate version differs significantly from H.794, the search and rescue bill which passed unanimously in the House last week, most notably by omitting interim search and rescue protocols and by calling for licensing of state emergency medical services providers. The Senate bill also calls for a smaller legislative study committee, and requires it to examine both search and rescue and emergency medical services.

Illuzzi said that a small legislative study committee will be best able to pull together the disparate volunteer search and rescue groups around the state, and that the interim protocols envisioned by the House search and rescue bill were unnecessary.

“Since the Vermont State Police already has modified its search and rescue protocols, now automatically alerting the local fire department of a potential search and rescue need, we felt that no interim law change is necessary,” Illuzzi said. “We would like to wait until the study recommendations are developed before enacting legislation.” He said examining both search and rescue protocols and emergency services licensing and organizational requirements will improve emergency services for Vermonters.

Members of the family of Levi Duclos — the 19-year-old hiker whose death from hypothermia on a popular hiking trail in Ripton this past January sparked public criticism of Vermont State Police search and rescue procedures — were present when the Senate bill passed. The family thanked the wide array of legislators, volunteer search and rescue personnel and other members of the public who have worked to speed legislation through the House and Senate since Levi’s death.

The family’s support, however, is for the House version of the search and rescue bill.

“The House bill not only sets up interim protocols, thereby not leaving those decisions to the VSP, but also defines a new Incident Command System and mandates assessing, utilizing and training resources,” said Kathy Duclos, Levi’s aunt. “None of these things will happen for at least another year if the language in the House bill, H.794, is not utilized in the final bill. It would be a shame to not make use of this well-researched and thoughtful bill.”

The legislation will now move to conference committee where members of the House and Senate will resolve differences between the two versions. Rep. Willem Jewett, D-Addison, is optimistic that action will be taken before the legislative session closes. He said the support of the Duclos family and friends for the more extensive House bill “will position us well in any negotiations that may be necessary with the Senate.”

~Cindy Ellen Hill

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 7:27 a.m. April 28. Correction: Sen. Mullin is a member of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, not the chair, as previously reported.

VTDigger

Photo of the H1N1 virus

Swine flu vaccine has been slow to arrive in Vermont, and because of the shortage, health officials have been forced to ration inoculations.

Vermont Department of Health has given top priority to the mass vaccination of schoolchildren, and the first school clinics start this week.

The youngest, most at-risk children, age 6 months to five years, must get vaccinations from private doctors who are typically backlogged with patient requests, or wait for immunizations at public clinics, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that this age group receive inoculations first when vaccine is in short supply.

Dr. Wendy Davis, commissioner of VDH, says she has directed the initial shipments of vaccine to local providers and school clinics. The department won’t launch public clinics until next week. So far it has only posted announcements on its Web site for public clinics in Manchester Center and Middlebury.

“I think the challenge people are feeling as parents and health care provider offices is related to the vaccine delays,” Davis says. “Providers are receiving vaccine, but they are going through it very quickly. I can understand how a parent might call on a certain day and they might be told ‘Call us back next week and we’ll see what we get.’ I’m hearing that provider offices have different strategies for doing this. Some are planning weekend clinics. Some are doing walk-in clinics every afternoon. Some are doing it by appointment.”

On Monday, VDH launched the first of its clinics in 330 Vermont schools. Because of the vaccine shortage, 19 out of 49 school clinics planned this week have been delayed, according to The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

As of Oct. 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shipped 34,200 doses to Vermont – about half of what is needed to inoculate the 65,000 schoolchildren VDH estimates will be immunized in Vermont.

Last Wednesday, Davis confirmed 45 cases of swine flu for the week ending Oct. 17 and announced that the virus is now widespread in Vermont. At schools around the state, dozens of absences had been reported because of suspected illness. Most of the cases in Vermont, according to Davis, have been mild.

Dr. Louis DiNicola, the president of the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, says his office has been extremely busy. He’s seeing many cases of flu-like illness, most of which he says are H1N1.

DiNicola, who has practiced medicine for 30 years, said, “It’s been the most difficult (flu) year I can remember.”

Given the current shortages of vaccine, it’s not clear yet how the department is planning to ensure the vaccination of very young children, who are at greater risk of complications from the swine flu, hospitalizations and death, according to the CDC.

Nationally, H1N1 vaccine has been allocated to states based on population numbers, according to VDH. The first few thousand doses (all that was available until this week) were given to health care providers, staff and the most vulnerable patients.

“While we wish we had the vaccine sooner, it’s certainly not slowing down our planning,” Davis said. “We are just receiving shipments that are ramping up from thousands per week to 10s of thousands per week. The expectation is that there will be more vaccine flowing in larger quantities as we move through the (flu) season, ultimately with the goal of making it available to anyone who wants it.”

The CDC guidelines, which VDH is obliged to follow, state that specific groups, including children under age 4, should be inoculated first when supplies are not yet widely available. (The other most vulnerable
“subsets” include children with medical conditions, pregnant mothers and adults with health problems, such as asthma, cystic fibrosis and heart disease.)

Patsy Tassler, epidemiologist for VDH, says, “We’re rolling it out as equitably as we can, as we get allocations of vaccine, making sure so that hospitals and providers, and in the coming weeks, schools, have vaccine.”

DiNicola recommends that parents call providers twice a week until they can get an appointment.

“Doctors are distributing the vaccine as fairly as possible to the highest risk populations,” DiNicola says.

At his own practice, DiNicola is scheduling same-day appointments for very young children when vaccine is available, and referring most school-age children to the clinics. He has a nurse on his staff whose primary responsibility is immunization.

“If someone dropped enough vaccine on our doorstep, we’d open an immunization clinic for patients,” he says.

Not all pediatricians, however, agreed to give swine flu shots. Some private physicians opted out of the government vaccination program, DiNicola says, because the required paperwork was too onerous.

So why didn’t the Department of Health publish a list of “participating” physicians? Larry Crist, director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness, says the department didn’t want to swamp local practices.

DiNicola says they really didn’t have time to publish it. Physicians were asked to turn in their paperwork three weeks ago, he says.

“The Health Department officials are doing the best they can,” DiNicola says. “We should have had 3,000 to 4,000 vaccines (by Friday), and we only had 100 last week.”

DiNicola highly recommends vaccinating children even if it appears that they may have already been exposed or had a flu-like illness. He says the peak of the H1N1 flu outbreak may be a month or so away.

Davis agrees. At a press conference last week she said, “With this first wave that has come through, although many people may be affected, many people may be spared.” She said in the second wave of the pandemic, many people could benefit from vaccination.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services describes H1N1 as a pandemic, a global disease outbreak of a new highly contagious influenza virus that causes serious illness among people who have little or no immunity to it.

On Saturday, President Barack Obama announced a national emergency in order to enable hospitals to set up off-site facilities for patients, if necessary. Swine flu is now considered widespread in 46 states.

The CDC has confirmed 95 pediatric deaths from H1N1 since April 2009. Of these, the majority were among children between the ages of 6 months to 2 years, according to DiNicola. The incidence of hospitalization has been the highest among children under 4, according to the CDC.

The swine flu has caused the hospitalization of 20,000 people in the United States, and more than 1,000 deaths have been attributed to the virus, according to The Washington Post.

Seasonal flu typically causes 36,000 deaths a year nationwide, according to Davis. What makes swine flu worrying is that it attacks healthy young people under the age of 24, while seasonal flu typically leads to complications and death among the very young, the sick and the very old.

What follows is a press release from VDH sent on Oct. 23 to schools and health care providers in Vermont.
2009-2010 H1N1 Influenza Season Update #4
Vaccination of School-Age Children

To: Health Care Providers, Hospitals, Infection Control Practitioners, Schools, Home Health Agencies
From: Wendy Davis, MD, Commissioner of Health
Date: October 23, 2009

– Please Distribute Widely –

School based vaccination clinics
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) notified states that vaccine manufacturers are experiencing delays in the production of the 2009 H1N1 vaccine. Since that time, the Vermont Department of Health (VDH) has been working with our many partners – including health care providers and schools – to review our vaccination plans and make adjustments as needed.

The first school clinics will begin on October 26; subsequent school clinics will occur less frequently than previously planned and some will need to be rescheduled. We will continue to provide vaccine to health care providers, hospitals, health agencies, and to schools as soon as we can, based on vaccine supply.

Our goal continues to be to move vaccine to providers and clinics as quickly as possible, to ensure vaccination of those individuals who need it most, including school-aged children.

Public and Private schools
• All private, parochial, independent and public schools were offered the opportunity to provide vaccine to their students in a school setting. The vaccination efforts are voluntary.
• Schools with 300 or more students were offered Health Department-run clinics.
• Schools with fewer than 300 students were asked to run their own clinics. Some chose to combine with other schools making them eligible for a Health Department-run clinic.
• We collaborated with small schools which are without a school nurse, and schools with a nurse working limited hours, to provide vaccinator staffing from either the Vermont Emergency Response Volunteer (VERV) vaccinator pool or contracted nursing staff.
• Schools that have not already scheduled a vaccination clinic are still able to do so. If interested in providing vaccine to students, schools may call their Health Department district office. Due to vaccine supply delays, newly scheduled clinics may not occur until December/January.
Parents in schools during vaccination clinics
• Parents have been encouraged to not attend the Health Department-run school based clinics. This is for logistical and security reasons, including making sure clinic flow is not slowed to a point where we are not able to vaccinate all the children scheduled for that day.
• Ultimately, the decision to allow parents to accompany their child during clinic is a local school decision.

Vaccine in provider offices
• It is our hope that vaccinating children at the school based clinics will help keep providers from being overwhelmed by calls and demand for vaccine from parents of children who can receive it at school. At the same time, we recognize that not all these children will be vaccinated at a school clinic, and that providers are faced with managing the currently limited supply of vaccine.
• Health Department continues to follow the CDC guidance, and is focusing its vaccination efforts on the ACIP identified target groups – taking care of those individuals who need it most. Please see the attached ACIP guidance for when initial supply of vaccine is not adequate to meet immediate and short term demand.
• Because of vaccine supply delays, Health Department recommends that providers balance the CDC guidance with their patient needs when determining which patients should receive the H1N1 vaccine. The attached guidance should help providers in making these determinations.

Other (non-school) vaccine availability sites
Public Clinics
• VAHHA agencies will begin conducting public clinics for the target group population in early November.
• Once scheduled, a frequently updated list of these public H1N1 clinics will be available online at the Health Department Web site: http://healthvermont.gov/prevent/flu/flu_clinics_h1n1.aspx. Members of the public may also dial 2-1-1 for information.

Provider Offices
• Health Department is recommending that patients not be instructed to call around to other providers to seek H1N1 vaccine. Patients should be in contact with their own provider, can check the above Health Department Web site, or dial 2-1-1 .

VTDigger