The states are generally doing a phased roll-out of the vaccine. What is often described as phase 1a usually encompasses health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities. Are they waiting for everyone in 1a to get their second shot before giving the first shot to members of 1b (usually the elderly and essential workers)?
I suspect that vaccinating nursing home residents takes a bit longer because of the time it takes to visit every small facility and that it can be administered faster once it is open to people who can travel to some sort of vaccination center.
Here are at least some explanations for what the problem is.
The logistics of the rollout have therefore largely been left up to states to navigate. But most states lack the capacity to properly administer the rollout. Moreover, hospitals and pharmacies are scrambling, trying to figure out where to set up vaccination sites. And, long-term care facilities are sorting out who can administer vaccinations, to whom, and where.
For quite some time, state and local public health officials have warned that they would need more than $8 billion in additional funding to create the infrastructure required to administer vaccines. Instead, the Trump Administration provided states with a paltry $340 million in funding to prepare for vaccinations. This implies that on average states have received less than $7 million each for vaccine readiness.
As Professor Jha, Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, lamented “the worst part is no real planning on what happens when vaccines arrive in states. No plan, just hope that states will figure this out.”
And then we have the approach of other countries.
Several European countries, for example, haven’t even begun to vaccinate, including the Netherlands. It appears, however that government officials there as well as other European nations want to first ensure that they’ve got an executable plan in place for comprehensive, mass vaccinations of priority groups to take place safely in, among other sites, long-term care facilities, hospitals, clinics, arenas, convention centers, school gyms, and libraries.