Butler Eagle readers learned last week that Gov. Tom Wolf approved a temporary waiver that allows pharmacists licensed by the Department of State to order and administer the COVID-19 vaccines without a physician’s order, but only when the vaccines are available to the public.

Effective Tuesday, anyone age 65 or older and people ages 16 to 64 with comorbidities (such as heart and lung issues and diabetes, to name a few) associated with COVID-19 can get the available vaccines in statewide administration from the providers, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

To see if you are eligible and to sign up, visit www.bit.ly/VaccineButler. Remember, two doses of the vaccine are required for protection.

The challenge is the dosage supply, which is limiting what vaccine administrators can do.

Meanwhile, Ellen Lyon, a spokeswoman for the Department of State, said pharmacists will be able to administer the vaccine throughout any part or phase of vaccine distribution without the need for an order from a doctor. She said while this gives pharmacists more freedom, it does not supersede the state’s distribution plans.

That means the state Health Department’s guidance takes precedence and vaccine administration has to fall in line with the phase identified by the department.

The state health department has a distribution plan that breaks groups of specifically identified people into three parts of Phase 1 with the general public being in Phase 2, the final phase. The state remains in Phase 1A.

State officials have focused on the distribution of the two federally-approved vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

“We are working on ways to increase access to the vaccine, and pharmacists already play an important role in making sure Pennsylvanians are protected,” said Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine.

In the most recent report as of press time, between the two suppliers, last week the state received 286,550 doses of the vaccine.

With 12.7 million Pennsylvanians to protect, those numbers seem awfully small. The pace of vaccine distribution has to pick up a lot if we are to defeat this terrible pandemic.

Even Bloomberg in its Prognosis Coronavirus Daily says the “U.S. vaccination rollout is a mess.”

According to Bloomberg, a nationwide expansion of the vaccine “would make 128 million people eligible. As of Sunday, 14.3 million doses had been distributed. That imbalance is causing chaos. On Friday, New York City said it will run out of shots this week without a resupply.”

A report last month in the Harvard Gazette noted that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that if the coming vaccination campaign goes well, we could approach herd immunity by summer’s end and “normality that is close to where we were before” by the end of 2021.

“We hope to get the overwhelming majority of people in this country vaccinated,” Fauci said in a mid-December Scientific American report. “We have the logistics under Operation Warp Speed and Gen. Gustave Perna (Operation Warp Speed’s chief operating officer) to put vaccines into the trucks, trains, planes and whatever it is that gets them to where they need to go.”

The end of the pandemic can’t come soon enough. More needs to be done to expedite the administration of the vaccine to everyone, and soon.

— AA