Credit: Phil Roeder
Republican state lawmakers from Bucks County have introduced a bill to force COVID-19 vaccines to be distributed to counties based on their population.
The legislation introduced by State Rep. Frank Farry, of Langhorne Borough, comes after the Philadelphia Inquirer published data that showed suburban counties were getting less vaccine doses per capita than many smaller, rural counties.
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The bill calls for mandating the Pennsylvania Department of Health to reduce existing shortfalls in the number of vaccines already distributed. It also calls for giving local health departments more of a voice in the distribution process.
A review of Pennsylvania Department of Health vaccine data by LevittownNow.com found similar results to that in the Inquirer’s reporting. Bucks County and Montgomery County received less doses per capita than much smaller counties like Elk, Montour, Mifflin, and Mercer counties.
Through Thursday, Bucks County has 38,327 people with one dose of the COVID-19 vaccines and 37,110 with both doses of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. State data shows that the rate per 100,000 residents is 12,007 people vaccinated.
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“Bucks County is being significantly shortchanged in the number of doses due to the administration’s formula for deciding how many doses of vaccine each county receives,” said Farry. “And Bucks County is not alone.”
Fellow GOP state representatives Wendy Thomas, of Northampton; Craig Staats, of Quakertown; Todd Polinchock, of Chalfont; K.C. Tomlinson, of Bensalem; Meghan Schroeder, of Warminster; and Shelby Labs, of Doylestown, are cosponsoring the legislation.
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“We are dealing with issues of life and death, which is too important a decision to be left to arbitrary formulas,” the Republicans said in a statement. “Clearly, the residents of Bucks County are in just as much danger of contracting the virus and deserve their proportional share of vaccines, but we cannot get a straight answer on how the formula for distributing the vaccine was crafted. We have had conference calls, written a detailed letter and continued to express our concerns and seek answers. The concerns raised by our residents, healthcare providers and county officials have been heard. Now we are left to force responsible actions by the state’s Department of Health by mandating it through statute. What we are proposing is a commonsense approach that should not need to be legislated. By distributing the vaccines based on population we will bring fairness to what is now a patently unfair system.”
Under the present system, the federal government and state government are charged with vaccine distribution.
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