Who is giving the Covid vaccines? States scramble to find vaccinators

Beating back Covid-19 right now comes down to balancing supply and demand. With hopes pinned to vaccines, demand has far outstripped the supply of doses.

But, as an increasing number of vaccine vials are shipped in coming weeks, the concern about shortages may well shift to human capital: the vaccinators themselves.

“We need to mobilize more medical units to get more shots in people’s arms,” Jeff Zients, coordinator of President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 task force, said at a briefing earlier this month.

Already, there have been scattered reports that vaccinators are in short supply in some areas.

“Absolutely, we do need more,” said Tom Kraus, vice president of government relations for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, whose members work in hospitals, clinics and large physician practices.

After all, vaccinating America is a huge undertaking.

“We are planning to vaccinate a lot more people over a shorter period of time than we’ve ever done before,” said L.J Tan, chief strategy officer of the Immunization Action Coalition, which distributes educational materials for health care professionals and the public across a range of vaccination topics.

Each year the U.S. vaccinates 140 million to 150 million residents against influenza, “but what we’re talking about now is much more intensive,” he said. For Covid-19, the goal is to get vaccines out quickly to all those eligible in a country of 330 million people.

A state-by-state survey would be required to estimate how many total vaccinators are needed nationally, Tan said.

Still, experts are cautiously optimistic that this won’t be a hard problem to fix, pointing to efforts underway to recruit current and retired medical professionals, as well as medical students and nurses in training.

“As long as we continue to see this interest in volunteering, we should have a sufficient workforce to do it,” said Deb Trautman, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

Not just anyone can be a vaccinator. One can’t merely walk into a center and offer to help give shots. The training requirements vary by state.

To boost the effort, both the Trump and Biden administrations, using an emergency preparedness law first adopted in 2005, expanded liability protections.

With the recent expansions, those qualifying include pharmacy interns and recently retired doctors and nurses, as well as physicians, nurses and pharmacists. The government estimates there are about half a million inactive physicians and 350,000 inactive registered nurses and practical nurses in the United States.

States are also greenlighting dentists, paramedics and other first responders, said Kim Martin, director of immunization policy at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Some are also turning to nursing and medical schools, where faculty and students are often eager to participate. More than 300 schools nationally have signed a pledge offering to help administer the vaccine, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

The University of Houston College of Nursing, for example, altered its…