Vermonters who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can gather with other people who are vaccinated — in groups of any size, Gov. Phil Scott announced Friday. Those Vermonters can also gather with one additional household that is not vaccinated.
Previously, the rule was that vaccinated people could gather with just one other household, vaccinated or not. The governor’s new rule goes into effect immediately.
“For example, if eight fully vaccinated individuals want to gather, they can do so, and bring one other household that’s not vaccinated,” Scott said.
The governor said that next week, he expects his administration’s restart team will be ready to “open the spigot” even further, with another easing of restrictions.
So far, Scott said, 20% of Vermonters age 16 and up have had at least one dose of the vaccine, or 152,631 people; 61,234 have gotten their second dose.
In Phase 5 of the state’s vaccination program, which begins next week, Scott said 75,000 more Vermonters will become eligible to get the vaccine, including teachers and other frontline workers.
Within a month, he said, a third of Vermont’s eligible population could be vaccinated.
Starting Monday, vaccination sites will open in seven school districts: Barre, Bennington County, Harwood Union, North Country, Mill River, Rutland City and Springfield.
Details of at least 28 additional school clinics are being finalized and should go online in the coming weeks, said Mike Smith, secretary of the Agency of Human Services.
However, Smith said Vermont’s allocation of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine so far has been less than expected, so extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine that didn’t end up being used in the effort to vaccinate people at long-term care facilities will be used to augment the supply.
Before Tuesday, it was thought that Johnson & Johnson would have 4 million doses ready to distribute throughout the U.S right away, Scott said. On Tuesday, he learned that number was actually 2.9 million doses, meaning that Vermont would not receive any of that vaccine next week, and only a very limited supply the following week, though he hopes the distribution will ramp up by the end of the month.
Additionally, Health Commissioner Mark Levine warned that there’s been a slight decline in testing in recent weeks, despite a big boost in testing for college-age Vermonters, as the University of Vermont changed its policies from once-weekly mandatory tests to twice-weekly testing requirements.
He said the overall decline isn’t enough to question the state’s test positivity rate, which he said is holding steady at a “manageable” 1.7% — but did urge Vermonters to continue to get tested.
Scott said once Vermonters with high-risk conditions and teachers, child care workers, police, first responders and corrections employees are able to get vaccinated, he hopes the state returns to an age-banding system, either in five- or 10-year increments, beginning with Vermonters age 60-65.
“It’s the simplest and most effective way that we have found,” Scott said of the age-banding strategy. “We’re seeing many other states’ governors call and ask how we’re doing what we’re doing. Many are going to age-banding after abandoning their strategy for other populations.”
But the vaccine supply is expected to expand rapidly, Scott said it’s possible that most Vermonters will get the vaccine “much sooner than we originally could have hoped for.”
Veterans in Essex
A walk-in vaccination clinic Friday at the Champlain Valley Expo in Essex Junction invited VA-enrolled veterans of all ages with existing medical conditions to get the vaccine.
The result was a huge traffic jam, as hundreds of vets showed up to get their shot, and at least some of them were turned away, being told only 400 doses of the vaccine were available, not enough for everyone who showed up.
However, Scott said those vets were turned away in error, and vaccine doses were in fact still available.
Wasted vaccine doses
Scott also responded Friday to a VTDigger report on how Central Vermont Medical Center wasted 99 doses of the Covid vaccine last month, because the hospital didn’t create a waitlist or find another way to use leftover doses.
Scott said that, until the article was published, he wasn’t aware of the hospital’s failure to implement a waiting list. The hospital is Berlin, where the governor lives.
“I have a very low tolerance to waste of anything, especially of these precious doses of the vaccine,” he said. “Had I known about it, we would have reacted differently.”
Smith said the report indicates the state needs to refine its inventory system so it gets alerts when this sort of thing starts to happen. However, he said, the amount of wasted vaccine in Vermont has still been only “a fraction of a fraction,” with 488 doses wasted out of 170,000 total.
The other sites that recorded the most wasted doses last month were the Department of Health district offices in White River Junction and Burlington, where 44 and 39 doses, respectively, went unused.
Smith said those doses either were not viable, or were dropped, which he said is far less concerning to him than what happened at Central Vermont Medical Center.
“This is going to happen, by the way, in a very labor-intensive sort of operation,” he said. “We are going to have mistakes, and I can understand that. What concerned me about Central Vermont was sort of getting to the end of the day and not having a procedure to put doses into people’s arms.”