President Joe Biden's new call for states to make every resident eligible for vaccines by May 1 is "absolutely doable" in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker said Friday, while cautioning that the federal government must increase the shipment of doses to accomplish universal vaccinations.
As the Bay State moved into the next lap of its fight against COVID-19 with the launch of a pre-registration system, Baker repeated his calls for the Biden administration to back up its goals with additional vaccine.
"If the feds can actually deliver on the vaccine supply issue that we've all been talking about — and the message we keep getting is we're just a couple of weeks away from being to the point where you're going to have more supply than you know what to do with — getting to the president's objective is absolutely doable," Baker told reporters during a visit to St. Mary's Catholic school in Lynn.
"It's going to require a significant increase in available supply to be able to deliver that kind of volume over a reasonably short period of time," Baker added. "But I can tell you this: I would love to have the problem of having so much supply, I can't figure out what to do with it. That's not the problem we have. We have the capacity to deliver three times the amount of supply we get."
Federal officials informed the Baker administration earlier this week that Massachusetts will not see an increase to its weekly shipment of about 150,000 first doses until at least the end of the month.
In a prime-time address to the nation Thursday night, Biden said he wants every state in the country to open up vaccine access to all adults by May 1 to get "closer to normal" by July 4.
Biden said Thursday that he would direct all states, territories and tribes to make all adults eligible for vaccines by May 1, noting that not everyone will be able to access a shot on that day but could get in line under his plan. By the end of May, he said, "we'll have enough vaccine supply for all adults in America."
The Baker administration's vaccine rollout plan since its launch has targeted April as the month when the immunization will become available to the general public.
Almost halfway into March, there are still several groups ahead of the general public who are awaiting eligibility, including essential workers in a range of industries and individuals with one medical condition that puts them at higher risk.
Last week, when Baker announced that K-12 and early child care school staff would soon be able to book appointments through the state, he said it would take "about a month" for all of the roughly 400,000 people in that group to access first doses.
Before addressing reporters Friday, Baker heard from a roundtable of students enrolled at St. Mary's, which like other parochial schools has been open for in-person learning since August.
"Kids are absolutely fired up about the possibility and the opportunity to be in-person," Baker said. "The work that's been done by so many of the schools -- public, private and parochial -- that have been open is a real sort of laboratory for everybody else. I certainly hope that many of the lessons learned over the course of the first two-thirds of this school year can be incorporated by others as well."
About half of schools in Massachusetts are using a weekly surveillance testing program that will help screen for COVID-19, Baker said, expressing optimism that more districts are in a better position to bring students back this spring compared to the beginning of the academic year.
"There's a lot of practical experience now that people have had in a variety of different settings that didn't exist back in August when people were trying to make these decisions," Baker said. "In January, we had about 266 communities in Massachusetts that were high-risk communities. Now we have 14. The progress the state's made with respect to reduce the presence, generally, of COVID in the environment as we've ramped up vaccinations has been extraordinary, and I think that'll make it easier to do this."
The Baker administration and the state's largest teachers' union are locked in an intensifying public dispute over a fuller return to in-person learning.
Education Commissioner Jeff Riley instructed schools to bring students back to classrooms five days a week by April 5 for elementary schools and April 28 for middle schools. The Massachusetts Teachers Association said the vaccination plans are "poorly timed" alongside those targets, prompting Baker to fire back that he would not "take vaccine away from people who are extremely vulnerable" and reallocate it to educators.
Baker's appearance also coincided with the deployment of a new pre-registration website for securing appointments at the state's seven mass vaccination sites.
During his remarks around 9:30 a.m., Baker said about 200,000 people had already filled out the pre-registration form to get notified by the state when they will be able to book appointments at whichever mass vaccination site is closest to them.
The first alerts will start going out on March 16, Baker said. Under the new system, participants will have 24 hours from when they receive the notification to book an appointment for some time during the following week.
The pre-registration website built through a partnership with Google went live with no apparent widespread crashes like the launch of an appointment finder tool in February.
Anyone in Massachusetts can fill out the pre-registration form starting Friday, including those who are not yet eligible to receive vaccines under the state's phased rollout. However, appointment notifications will only go out to those who currently qualify to receive vaccines, and Baker said it will function on a "first-come, first-serve" basis for pre-registrations from eligible participants.
Residents who are not yet eligible, such as younger adults in non-essential industries, can still pre-register starting Friday, but the Baker administration says there is no advantage to doing so before their turn arrives.
On the day that the next eligibility phase begins, the state system will shuffle together those who already filled out the registration form days or weeks prior with those who sign up at the official start of the new phase before it begins distributing appointment notifications.
"If you're not currently eligible and you sign up, what will end up happening is you'll end up in the pool whenever your eligibility begins," Baker said Friday. "If your eligibility begins on, for the sake of argument, April 10, you will be with everybody else who registers. You're not going to get ahead of that because that wouldn't be fair at all to the people who showed up on the first day of eligibility."
