After a month of offering the COVID-19 vaccine Moderna first to health care workers, first responders, and the county’s 70-plus population, Chaffee County Public Health (CCPH) has now administered 1,953 doses of COVID-19 vaccine. It announced this morning that it is streamlining its vaccine strategy to allow only those people in the designated groups for the time slots to get the vaccine.
While in the past it included people outside those groups due to the time constraints necessary to make sure that extra vaccine doses don’t go to waste, CCPH says that in the past week, the honor system has been abused, causing resulting traffic, ethical and logistical problems at the vaccine center set up at the Chaffee County Fairgrounds.
CCPH has a state-mandated goal of reaching 70 percent vaccination of those 70 and older by Feb. 28. With so many unknowns about the federal and state inventory of vaccines, plus disparities in distribution across the state, it is possible that at that point the county might need to pause vaccine distribution to allow the rest of the state to catch up. That will depend upon Governor Jared Polis’ directive.
As soon as the county gets the green light to move on to other groups, CCPH says that it will open more first dose clinics. In the meantime, it is limiting its vaccine clinics only to those in the designated population groups, and only for those who have appointments. Moving forward, CCPH will be lining up no more than 10 people in vehicles (who fall within the approved vaccine groups) to prepare for extra doses in a vial that need to be used up and not wasted.
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