Instead of giving Philadelphia’s four collar counties tens of thousand doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the state plans to open two large vaccination clinics.
The move has upset local officials who wanted more doses for county-backed vaccination clinics. Bucks County plans to have six mass vaccination clinics within weeks and expects vaccine allocations to expand.
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The locations of the two Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) mass vaccination clinics were not released as of Friday, but their planned creation came after pleas from local officials that one large site would not be easily accessible to all people.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported 42,000 Johnson & Johnson doses have been set to be split between the two clinics per week. The clinics would be in addition to county-overseen clinics that have been receiving Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
During a visit to the Bucks County Intermediate Unit in Doylestown Township Friday, Gov. Tom Wolf mentioned the two sites, a fact not previously made public.
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There has been a back and forth publicly and, according to local officials, privately between county and elected state officials and the Wolf administration. County leaders have called for more vaccine doses to be sent directly to the counties and not for the creation of state-run clinics.
Frustration and bipartisan upsetment in the suburbs followed an analysis earlier this month by the Philadelphia Inquirer that showed suburban counties were getting less vaccine doses per capita than many smaller, rural counties.
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“We are extremely disappointed to hear that PA DoH is not considering our request to allocate the Johnson and Johnson vaccine directly to Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties. We have reiterated our concerns about establishing a regional PEMA site for many reasons, and we remain deeply concerned that equitable distribution will be compromised at such a site,” the commissioners from Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties said in a joint statement.
The county leaders said there are unanswered questions about how residents will pre-register for vaccination and how equitable access for the two regional sites will be handled.
“We also remain concerned that without an allocation of single shot Johnson and Johnson vaccines our efforts to efficiently vaccinate our most vulnerable residents will be hampered. This includes residents experiencing homelessness, homebound individuals, and people within our correctional facilities,” they said.
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On Friday, Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick teamed up with Bucks County Commissioner Chairperson Diane Ellis-Marseglia and a bipartisan group of area state legislators, including State Rep. Frank Farry, State Rep. Tina Davis, and State Sen. Tommy Tomlinson, to send a letter to Wolf and Acting Pennsylvania Health Secretary Alison Beam.
“Bucks and Montgomery counties have the existing infrastructure and resources to handle an influx of direct shipments if the state decides to forgo the mass vaccination centers and send those earmarked allocations to the counties equally,” lawmakers wrote.
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The governor and his administration have been pressed on vaccine allocation by reporters and have defended the rollout.
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