The ordeal of seniors trying to get COVID vaccine shots at the Williamsburg Walgreens Sept. 4 was a clown show. Only it was not funny.
New access rules by anti-vaxxer-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. placed limits on who qualified for shots as new COVID vaccines entered the market. Kennedy restricted shots to healthy children and young adults. But all adults older than 65 were supposed to qualify automatically.
Instead, many of us seniors awaiting shots at Walgreens received news that Virginia had decided to require individual prescriptions to receive the latest COVID vaccines.
Many states took a different approach from Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin catered to vaccine deniers to win election in 2021. Those states did not require individual prescriptions to let pharmacies, who historically have given most COVID shots, administer the new vaccines.
Virginia’s rules came as a surprise to many physicians. The new process overruled easy public access to COVID inoculations that Americans, especially those over 65, have received since the pandemic was declared in 2020.
Kennedy’s restrictions and Youngkin’s policy seemed designed to raise questions about the safety and effectiveness of COVID vaccines. Millions of saved lives already answered those questions. Needless restrictions built new roadblocks that could leave people unprotected as COVID spikes this fall.
Thankfully, Walgreens reacted. The drug store chain submitted a protocol to the Virginia Board of Nursing that was approved and announced Wednesday. It allows pharmacists to give COVID shots to seniors and those under 65 with certain conditions without prescriptions.
Otherwise, seniors and other vulnerable Virginians would have been stuck in politically motivated regulatory chaos.
The first move came from Kennedy, a quack appointed as secretary of Health and Human Services by President Donald Trump. Kennedy declared war on vaccines long before he joined the administration, and packed his advisory committee with vaccine skeptics for good measure. He also fired the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy has overseen cuts to medical research and eliminated 10,000 jobs across HHS. Those cuts, including for cancer research, were made to allow permanent tax breaks to the country’s richest individuals and corporations.
The second move came from Youngkin, who hopes to run for president for a Republican Party that wages war on science in the name of religion and “individual freedom.” Ever the hypocrite, Youngkin did not seem concerned about my “individual freedom” or the other folks at Walgreens last week.
Before the protocol was hammered out, the state required pharmacies to get prescriptions for specific brands of vaccine at specific doses, the Walgreens staff said. In the case of Moderna, the vaccine Walgreens had, that meant a specific dose was lower than last year’s standard dose. No one around me had heard of any such rules.
Nor had my doctor. He had to send three separate prescriptions to finally meet the prickly requirements. Luckily, my physician responded quickly. Others around me waited hours past appointment times to get clearance and still others left, forced to come back another day.
The confusion at Walgreens occurred at the very time Kennedy told a U.S. Senate committee that he did not know how many Americans died from COVID. Multiple national and international epidemiological studies put the number around 1.2 million from March 2020 to May 2023.
That body count apparently does not concern Republicans. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and his appointed surgeon general recently proposed a ban on all vaccine mandates. This would mean people walking the streets or sitting in classrooms carrying preventable diseases and deadly viruses that could pass to unsuspecting children and adults.
I spoke to a man who had made his COVID shot appointment two weeks before, but never heard that he needed a prescription. As we talked, news flashed on his cell phone about a confirmed case of measles in a local school.
The CDC website says, “Measles is highly contagious. If one person has it, up to 9 out of 10 people nearby will become infected.”
Here was another case for vaccination.
I finally got my COVID shot, along with a flu shot. I was relieved, not reassured. When a president cuts medical research to fund tax breaks for the wealthy, then entrusts public health to those who ignore science and chase conspiracy theories, people will inevitably suffer from their policies.
Jim Spencer of Williamsburg is a former Minnesota Star Tribune Washington correspondent, Denver Post and Daily Press columnist, Chicago Tribune feature writer and Virginian Pilot journalist.
