Some got vaccines early, ahead of planned rollout

Numerous people reported to The Bulletin they received the first Pfizer vaccine dose (two are required) within 24 hours at St. Charles Bend and were scheduled for appointments to get the second within three to four weeks.

Former state Sen. Neil Bryant, 72, told The Bulletin he and his wife, Mary, 73, were able to get an appointment online on Thursday, Jan. 14 and his shot on Friday evening, Jan. 15. He received his second shot Feb. 5. People age 70-74 were not officially eligible for vaccines until Feb. 22.

“I got a call from a friend to make the appointment. We didn’t think we were eligible in the Tier 1 group, but the staff did not ask us about our eligibility. We signed a waiver that the drug was an experimental drug, but did not have to attest that we were in the Tier 1 group or had underlying health conditions.”

There was an attestation form on the St. Charles website, but if people registered directly through MyChart, they were able to bypass this step in the process. St. Charles closed that loophole after becoming aware of the problem, St. Charles spokeswoman Lisa Goodman said..

Bryant told several other friends, who also logged on to the MyChart site. He said several were able to get the first shots. Some got appointments for Saturday, Jan. 16, but within 48 hours the appointment page had closed down and the Saturday appointments were canceled.

A couple of other people told The Bulletin that they, their spouses and close relatives, also received the shots in mid-January, though they were not medical workers. If they showed up with an elderly parent, they, too received a shot. They declined to have their names used for this article. Most had said it was unintentional on their part, but since they were present, they agreed to get the shot.

Goodman said that it’s highly likely some people skirted the protocols early on in the vaccination clinics.

“Initially, the state left a lot of it to us to figure out. We acknowledge that it is likely that a number of people who were not eligible were able to get vaccinated,” Goodman said. “The thinking was we need to get vaccines into arms and we are going to do our best to screen for eligibility, but ultimately, it was an imperfect process.”

Goodman noted that whenever there was leftover vaccines from the clinic at the Deschutes County Fair and Expo Center due to someone missing an appointment, those shots were given to patients staying at the hospital who had underlying conditions and to volunteers at the fairgrounds clinic.

“The shelf life of the vaccine is so short, we felt it is best to get it into people who need it,” she said.

Goodman said she had heard anecdotally that caregivers were reaching out to people to notify them there were extra doses.

“We very quickly reacted with internal communications to stop that. We communicated to our workforce that family members were not eligible unless they are employed by St. Charles or are a health care worker with another organization.”

“I can’t speak to those incidents or verify that. What I do know is in January, some employees were mistakenly under the impression that there were ‘extra’ vaccines. We prepared the exact number of doses for the people who were scheduled. If there were no shows, we would take the vaccines to the hospital and vaccinate our inpatients. If we had extra doses, they were given to our high-risk inpatients.”

Since then, St. Charles has instituted checkpoints to ensure people are eligible to receive the vaccine. They are asked to fill out an online form and then are contacted for further verification and scheduling.

“Throughout this process, we have done our best to ensure those who are receiving vaccines are eligible,” Goodman said. “What matters most is tens of thousands of people have now been vaccinated and we are starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

As of Tuesday, St. Charles Health System had distributed 32,507 COVID-19 vaccinations in coordination with Deschutes County Health Services and the Oregon National Guard.