President Joe Biden wants states to open vaccine appointments to all adults beginning in May. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has said that’s a great goal — but first, he said, the feds have a lot of work to do.
Baker has said that if the state is going to start offering the COVID-19 vaccine to any adult starting May 1, the state needs to see a big increase in the number of doses it's receiving.
Matt Murphy of the State House News Service join us to talk about the latest on this.
Matt Murphy, State House News Service: The president's challenge to open up vaccination programsto all adults by May fed right into this capacity versus supply issue that Baker has been talking about for months now.
The state, the governor says, has the capacity to administer many more shots than it currently is. The issue, the governor has said repeatedly, is supply.
The state receives about 150,000 first doses each week, and that has not increased in several weeks. It is not going to increase for the rest of the month of March, the state has been told by the CDC.
With teachers becoming newly eligible last week for the state program, that added about 400,000 new people to the eligibility list in Massachusetts, on top of the 65-and-older crowd, and first responders and other frontline workers who continue to get vaccinated.
There is just great competition and demand for these shots in the state, despite having more capacity. And many of the mass vaccination sites, pharmacies and other locations just don't have enough doses to meet that demand.
There's one point of disagreement on vaccines that continues to revolve around teachers. The governor opened up some appointments to them, but says he wants to make sure people in more vulnerable groups don't have to wait for vaccines. That led to some tension last week, and the governor got pretty worked up. You called it a "war of words." Should we expect more attention like that this week?
Yeah, this really reached a boiling point last week after a meeting between the administration and some of the unions to talk about vaccinations.
The issue here, really, is about how quickly the state can vaccinate teachers, and whether or not it can do so before it brings students back to in-person learning.
The teachers' unions are asking that more teachers be vaccinated before they be forced to return to the classroom. And they're asking that it be done locally — that the state divert some of the doses set aside for educators, and bring them in a new program to schools, on-site, to minimize disruption, and make it easier for teachers to get away from work and get the shot.
But the governor does not want to create a separate program just for this one group. And he also is showing no signs of backing away from his plan, despite the limited availability of doses for teachers and everyone else to bring back all elementary school students to full-time, in-person learning by April 5, followed by middle school students by April 28.
Some lawmakers, including Northampton state Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, want to delay full reopening of elementary schools until after spring break — and introduced a bill doing that. Is there any chance of that passing?
Baker has shown very little willingness to back off of his position. The speaker of the House, Ron Mariano, and Senate President Karen Spilka have agreed, in large part, with the teachers, and the need to get vaccinated to safely return to in-person learning. And it may take an act of the legislature to change the timeline at this point.
There's a pivotal hearing Tuesday on the future of the Holyoke Soldiers Home. The state-run facility was the site of more than 70 deaths tied to COVID-19. Everyone agrees it's out of date, and it needs updating or replacing. But there's disagreement on how big to build it. And there are some tight deadlines approaching for federal funding. What should we expect to learn at the hearing?
This will be an interesting hearing to watch — because of the deadline the state is trying to meet on April 15 to apply for federal matching grants that would pay for up to 65% of this new soldiers' home.
The governor says he needs the bill on his desk and signed by April 1 to meet that deadline. His legislation would authorize up to $400 million in borrowing to build this.
One of the early issues for lawmakers was the size. The governor's administration proposed to reduce the size of the Holyoke home from about 235 beds to 192. They appear to have listened to lawmakers and upped the footprint of this proposed new building.
We've heard talk about whether a behavioral health unit gets added to this design plan. It will be interesting to see whether some of these issues can be worked out in the design phase over time, or if any of these problems that lawmakers have with the proposal could kill this bill, or at least postpone it, which would force the state to wait for another fiscal year to apply for federal funding.
