Baker defends vaccine rollout, will testify again in two weeks

BOSTON — Gov. Charlie Baker logged onto the Legislature’s first COVID-19 oversight hearing Thursday morning armed with statistics about the state’s improving virus conditions and his administration’s efforts to get COVID-19 vaccines into the arms of residents.

Massachusetts is tops in the nation for first doses administered per capita among states with five million or more people; the Bay State has administered more than three times more doses per capita than the European Union and more than five times more per capita than Canada; the state ranks second in the country for percentage of Black residents who have gotten at least one shot, and every county has vaccinated at least 56 percent of its residents 75 years or older, the governor said from his ceremonial office in the State House.

That wasn’t exactly the conversation the new Joint Committee on COVID-19 and Emergency Preparedness was interested in having. House co-chair Rep. Bill Driscoll asked the governor if, despite the stats he listed, he would characterize the state’s vaccine rollout as “a top 10 rollout.”

“Unfortunately, these hopeful figures do not tell the whole story,” Driscoll said after himself referencing recent improvements in COVID-19 metrics here in his opening remarks. “These numbers hide the confusion caused by frequent pivots and course corrections, and the daily frustrations residents face trying to access the vaccine. Residents must book their appointments on cumbersome and flawed websites and hope their internet connection is stronger than the thousands of others competing for the same batch of limited appointments. The system benefits those with time, resources, and mobility and disadvantages those most vulnerable populations that have suffered disproportionately from this pandemic. It tries to prioritize efficiency over equity.”

Baker, in his prepared remarks and in response to questions from lawmakers, cited the constraints in the supply of the two federally-approved vaccines as the primary challenge and defended his administration’s decisions to prioritize groups that other states did not, like group home residents and staff, inmates and staff at prisons and jails, and all hospital workers.

“I think many states chose to pursue a variety of different approaches to this which makes it hard to draw really broad comparisons between states,” the governor said. “As I said in my remarks, Massachusetts chose early on to prioritize a number of communities and a number of professions that weren’t prioritized in other states that did make us look, if you just based it on the numbers, like a low performer relative to many other states that didn’t focus on those hard-to-reach populations that we chose to focus on.”

Driscoll invited Baker to return for more testimony in two weeks and Baker said he looked forward to it.

Baker defends vaccine rollout, will testify again in two weeks

Cox Media Group