Long-Term Care Residents Placed at Highest Priority for Vaccine
On Tuesday, December 1, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to include long term care residents at the highest level of priority for the first distributions of a COVID-19 vaccine. This includes residents of skilled nursing centers, assisted living communities and other residential care settings.
Long term care residents are now included with health care workers in Phase 1a. This is extremely important because going into the meeting, our residents were Phase 1b, just after health care workers. View the materials that were discussed during the ACIP meeting.
Unfortunately, the reality is that there will not be enough doses in the initial batches of vaccine for everyone in the top tier to be vaccinated immediately. Pfizer projects they can produce only 6.5 million initial doses of their vaccine. There are at least 21 million health care workers and three million long term care residents.
In addition, states are not required to follow these guidelines. It will now be up to each state to decide how to allocate its limited supply of vaccine. We and our partners are continuing to make the case that our residents and employees should be first to receive the vaccine. Our argument is strengthened by this decision by the CDC, but our work is not done. We, along with our state partners and federal colleagues at AHCA/NCAL, will keep fighting for our residents and staff and won’t stop until everyone in our buildings has access to the vaccine.
