News Room

For months, Marcia Goldstein of Waynesville thought her 94-year old mother, Maxine Goldstein, would get a COVID-19 vaccine at Bella Vista Gracious Retirement Living, her retirement community in Asheville. Bella Vista’s management did too. But within the past week, both said they were surprised to learn Bella Vista wouldn’t receive any vaccines. “I got desperate, I got frustrated, I got scared for my mother,” Marcia said upon hearing the news. “She’s not a spring chicken.” Marcia and Maxine had been told Bella Vista was part of the CDC Pharmacy Partnership Program for Long-term Care, which has contracted CVS and Walgreens to administer vaccines in long-term care facilities across most states, including North Carolina.  

One of President Joe Biden’s most pressing tasks is speeding up America’s Covid-19 vaccination efforts. Vaccines are the US’s way out of the pandemic. But the vast majority of Americans — perhaps 70 percent or more, though we don’t know for sure — will have to be inoculated to reach herd immunity or protect at least most of the population. That means vaccinating hundreds of millions of people. The US isn’t on track to do that quickly. Former President Donald Trump’s administration aimed to vaccinate 20 million Americans by the end of 2020. Three weeks into 2021, slightly more than 15 million have gotten at least one dose. 

President Joe Biden’s national distribution plan for COVID-19 vaccines calls for increased access and ramping up production for a pandemic that he warned on Thursday will get worse before it gets better. “More people, more places, more supply,” Bechara Choucair, the Biden administration’s vaccine coordinator, told reporters. “That’s what this boils down to.” Biden wants to expand the number of people with access to vaccines as quickly as possible. His plan seeks to create hundreds of mass vaccination centers around the country. And he wants to compel the manufacturers of vaccines, and of the medical equipment required to administer them, to ramp up production.

As states try to pick up the pace in administering coronavirus vaccines, they’re asking a wide range of nontraditional workers to step in. And that means people rolling up to get their shot might find a National Guard member, a dentist, or a veterinarian on the other side of the needle. As of Wednesday, the U.S. has distributed more than 36 million vaccine doses, but administered only about 16.5 million. There’s a host of reasons for that imbalance, including inadequate planning, but some health officials are grappling with a shortage of people able to give the shot. After all, health care workers are also busy managing the COVID-19 pandemic itself.

Of the many things that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear to us, surely one of them is a newfound realization that public health has become increasingly complex. Understanding the challenges to public health – that is, the task of guarding the well-being of the U.S. population – is essential now more than ever. As an engineer, design futurist and graduate program director, I have seen how COVID-19 has transformed how public health preparedness is viewed and understood. Some say the pandemic has delivered an urgency for a reimagining of public health. From problems in producing PPE that demonstrate the vulnerabilities in critical supply chains to solutions in vaccine distribution challenges that leverage innovative public-private partnerships, new perspectives and approaches to public health are necessary.