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- The expanding effort to get more people vaccinated in Memphis and Shelby County, tonight, on Behind The Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian and thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by the co-leaders of the vaccine distribution effort in Shelby County.

Doug McGowen is Chief Operating Officer for the City of Memphis.

Doug, thanks for joining us again.

- Thank you, Eric, glad to be here.

- Gina Sweat, is Director of the Memphis Fire Department.

Director Sweat, thanks for being here.

- All right, thanks Eric.

- As well as Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

I'll start with you, Doug, and then we go to Gina, but we're at this point where we probably have a bit more vaccine, maybe a lot more.

I'll let you answer this question, but the vaccine supply keeps growing and growing and it was growing even before we got the federal intervention and maybe even more doses than we have people coming to fill the slots.

So for us to get to what herd immunity or as Keith Norman who was on the show last week, called community immunity, how do we get more of those available appointments and more of those available doses in the arms of people who want a vaccine?

- Sure, well, it's a great question, Eric.

And I wanna highlight first, the success we've had so far because many people are coming to get their vaccinations.

So as of today, I'm pleased to announce that we have administered more than 400,000 vaccines in Memphis and Shelby County.

That means more than 250,000 people have received at least one dose.

So we have had success, but I also think that we have introduced a heck of a lot of change in just a very short period of time.

As you said, the vaccine supply has gone up relatively dramatically in the last few weeks.

We had a significant uptick in the amount of supply coming including some J & J.

We also at the same time lowered the age all the way down to 16 and opened it up to everyone.

And at the same time we had, as you just mentioned, the opportunity for 21,000 additional doses through FEMA, through the City of Memphis-run site at the Pipkin building that we partner with FEMA and DOD.

So, all of that's happened in just about a week or two's time.

That is a lot of change.

So, across our five fixed sites, plus our community pods, we're administering each and every week about a thousand doses on a daily basis at different churches around the city.

There was a lot of availability that has come over the past few weeks.

So I do think there's a bit of catching up to do with people to make people's awareness that there really is this new opportunity for everybody 16 and above.

We went from 45 and above to 16 and above overnight.

So there's a whole body of people out there who still, despite our best efforts, may not be aware that they can get a vaccine.

So that's the number one challenge.

I'm confident that Memphis and Shelby Countians will come up and answer the bell about getting a vaccine.

There is work that we are doing to try to get more people through the door.

And we talked a little bit about that yesterday at the press conference.

And we're happy to talk about some of those initiatives here this morning, if you'd like.

- And, right before I go to Director Sweat, the goal is give or take 650,000 people?

Is that the herd immunity goal?

- You talk to the epidemiologist, David Sweat at the health department, and he will say, of the 950,000 people we have in Shelby County, that is the goal.

Realizing that we have fully a couple 100,000 people under the age of 16, that would mean we'd have to get nearly every adult in Memphis and Shelby County.

So that remains the very lofty goal but in order to do that, we'd have to get almost every adult vaccinated.

So we're gonna keep that as the bar, we're just gonna keep pushing forward and try to get as many get as close as we possibly can to that number.

- Director Sweat, you all came in, as things were, the city took over when things are going badly and we don't have to relive all that with, the distribution effort not going really well.

But from your point of view, what have been the keys to smoothing out the problems that we were having?

Again, I don't mean to beat up on the past 'cause this is a very difficult and really unprecedented situation but ya'll's involvement at the fire department, your involvement in a leadership role has brought what to this much smoother effort?

- It's a very good question.

And I also agree, we don't live in the past.

We live in today and how do we make it better in the future?

And that was one of the first things that we reinforced at our team, is we're not living in what has happened.

We're gonna move this thing forward and make it better.

So one of the first things I did is look at my team and who were the key players who could be redeployed to make this type of thing happen.

We have a very busy, very robust EMS system here.

So the first step was we had already become certified as a recipient of the vaccine.

So that was the first step.

And we had administered a vaccine to our firefighters and to first responders in an effort to help the health department with the vaccine process.

So it's pretty, we're used to managing chaos and taking a situation that's bad and it may look like there's a lot of chaos when you report to a fire scene or emergency scene but we have what we call a incident command system, which means everyone has a role and responsibility.

You give them the authority to make decisions and to get things done.

Chief McGowen, we've also called some other, Tiffany Collins is one of those key players in our management team.

We've put together a key management team and then pulled in some personnel that could actually make this thing happen.

So, you know, it's pretty simple.

You give them the authority, the responsibility, and then you'd let them make the right decision.

We've done that throughout, we've put systems in place.

We put processes in place to make sure, especially with the vaccine inventory control and distribution.

EMS of Memphis Fire Department is solely responsible for that piece, working in collaboration with our partner at Regional One.

And we just put responsibility in place, accountability and I think the good, the key to that is the community trust the Memphis Fire Department and knows that we're gonna get this thing done and we're gonna get it done as efficiently and as quickly as possible because not only do we need to get all those people vaccinated, but we need to do that as quickly as possible so we can return our community back to somewhat of a normal lifestyle.

- Let me bring in Bill Dries.

- Doug, as you mentioned, FEMA is in town and he's set up shop on Tiger Lane in a big way.

What is the impact of that federal presence and broadening the testing hours as well as all of the vaccine that the Feds bring with them to the city?

- That's a great question, Bill, but I do wanna be clear that this remains a City of Memphis operation, FEMA and the Department of Defense have clearly said that they are in support of what we are doing.

So they saw a very successful operation at the Pipkin building and all of what we were doing for vaccination.

They said "We would love to help you expand that opportunity "by bringing more vaccine and a few more bodies to help you put shots in arms."

And so it remains a City of Memphis operation.

They are here in support and we could not be more pleased with the support.

These are professional soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who have come to help our city.

There are young people, who are from the Memphis area, who are wearing the cloth of our nation, who have been off doing the business of our nation and have returned to help administer these doses.

So it really is a collaboration from top to bottom.

It's a unique collaboration in Memphis.

Typically, as you said, Bill, in other areas FEMA has gone in and set up the site and then the community has fallen in on top of that.

Here we have flipped that on its head, they are coming in to support us in this effort, in the efforts that we have underway.

That is a huge opportunity.

I mentioned at several outlets that many other cities and counties do not have the opportunity to take advantage of 21,000 additional doses on top of what is our fair share in Memphis from the state is an opportunity that we ought not squander.

People should take advantage of that.

They need to come out, see the process of the Pipkin building.

I also encourage you to go to any of the other sites that we have.

One of the things that we talked about early on is that we have to get the wait times down so that people have a good experience.

Where it was once hours of wait time, it is now averaging between 8 and 12 minutes.

So we're really not gonna take up much of your time.

We wanna get you a very high throughput and we wanna make sure your experience is a good one.

And the folks at the Pipkin building who are doing this community vaccination site, very high volume, we have the capacity to do 3,000 appointments a day.

That's the minimum.

When you talk to those soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, they're like, "Sir, we can do 50% more than that, "if you would just let us.

"If we could get more people here, we could do more vaccines than 3,000 a day."

So that's what I'm encouraging people to do is, they're setting the bar, they're standing by.

Let's get out there and take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.

- Director Sweat, what does the federal presence as part of this county wide operation mean for getting to other areas and things like pop-up sites to reach the people who are the hardest to reach?

- Well, that's a great question as well Bill.

Before the FEMA got involved, we had already, over the past few weeks, we put a team together specifically for community outreach and they have been working mostly with the faith based organizations.

And we have pop-up schedule, at least one or two community pods, most of those are at churches, at least 21 churches, where we have had community events either already or are scheduled within the next three weeks.

So that team had done such a fantastic job.

It's in each of those community pods, can do a minimum of 500 a day up to a 1,000 to 1,200 a day.

So we've had a lot of success with that, reaching out into the community where we had the lowest uptake of appointments.

So what this means is we have our vaccine allocation from Shelby County, that we can deploy to those community pods.

We also had our first big uptake of J & J vaccine that we're trying to get out into the community and those hard to reach populations where people have a choice.

Some people prefer J & J, some people prefer Pfizer or Moderna.

We're not doing as much Moderna but we are having limited opportunities.

People, there's no excuse to not get the vaccine if you want it.

If you want it, we will find a way to make sure that people have that opportunity and that's kinda how I see us.

Our role is to remove all obstacles, all barriers.

We heard loud and clear that the wait time was an obstacle.

We fixed that problem.

So anything else, any other obstacles, all we need to do is know about it.

We're working with, there should be information come out today, rides with MATA, working with church organizations to do group buses, working with large businesses to do employee events, block off appointments at the Pipkin, whatever the obstacle is, whatever the barrier is, just let us know and we will remove that and make sure that everyone who wants a vaccine can get a vaccine here in Shelby County.

- Doug, at the outset of this, you talked about a lot of change over a relatively short period of time.

To be clear, when you talked about this at the opening of the effort at the fairgrounds this past week.

You also serve notice that this effort, it might change again, if that's what is needed to pivot and respond to changing conditions on the ground.

- Yeah, that's right, Bill.

So we have a bent towards action, I hope that's evident in what we've done.

As you know, our first action we took, we tried to pivot to a statewide appointment system.

Less than 24 hours in, we determined, despite our best efforts to make that successful less than 24 hours and we determined that that was not a good fit for us and we went right back to the old system.

So the very first change that we made, I have a saying that is relatively common in military vernacular, is that "Even the best plan doesn't survive first contact with the enemy."

You have to be flexible and be able to adapt to the conditions on the ground.

And so the first change we made, we anticipated having three weeks of first doses at the Pipkin site.

Well, we didn't get all of those filled.

So we immediately opened into first and second doses.

That meant we had to go all the way up chain in FEMA to get approval to do that but we did that in less than an hour and we made that change.

Now, the second thing that you'll see is this morning, since we still have some vacancies with our appointments, we thought, well there may be some folks in the community who just do not want to have an appointment, they want to have their opportunity to go get that.

So this week, we are making another change.

All of the appointments, there's still plenty of appointments available for people, but at the end of the day, today, tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday between 5:00 p.m and 8:00 p.m, we will have 500 additional doses for first come, first serve clients.

So, if you wanted to come at the end of the day, the first 500 people in line will get a vaccine at the end of each and every day without any appointment being necessary.

We will look also, as we move into next week, to determine whether we need to shift hours.

One of the things that we saw, even in our first day is that the appointments were filling up at 8:00 to 8:30 and 8:30 to 9:00.

We think there's a demand for people on their way to work, so we may consider opening as early as seven o'clock to get more people on their way to work.

We're gonna continue to make those incremental changes to adapt to the conditions that we see unfolding before us.

None that changes the fact that we have a very high throughput site, that people if you want an appointment, you will get an appointment.

If you want an option to come without an appointment, we'll have a time for you to do that.

And I would submit that the wait times will also, while they might be a little longer than appointment, they probably will not be super long because we do have very high throughput.

- At one point, and I should note for people watching this, we are taping this Thursday morning.

So if there's a bit of a time warp when this airs on Friday, that's the reason.

Back to this, you got ahead of my question in a good way, Doug, that the notion of just drive-by, drive-in, I see a site.

I mean, there are now, let's back up a little bit.

Covid19.memphistn.gov is where people can go.

I think I said that correctly, or they can just search for Memphis vaccine appointments and they will get the list of all the public sites, the pop-up sites as well as links to all the private sites though, the Walgreens, the Kroger, the Walmart, others.

And so, or people can call I believe 901-222-SHOT.

And they can figure out where that is and for themselves or for someone they're there, you know a loved one, family, et cetera.

So we should repeat that.

Again, go through the challenges, but the opportunities of having doses available without an appointment, because it would seem that, you know I mean, if you think of blood drives where they bring the mobile blood van around or you think of flu shots and there's a pop-up tent in a big public place and you're, "Oh wait.

"Yeah, I forgot to get my flu shot this year.

I can just walk over and get it."

It would seem to get to our lofty goal of 650, we're gonna need more of that non-appointment availability.

But I assume that's difficult, particularly with Pfizer and Moderna given the handling issues and the freezer issues.

So talk through again, if you would repeat the availability for no appointment and where the people can get that one.

And two, how can that, if that can be expanded to other sites and other hours?

- Okay, so that's a lot but I'll cover that, Eric.

The only change that we are making this week is to the Pipkin site and that is between 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM.

There will be 500 doses available for first come, first serve people.

So the first 500 cars through, without an appointment, between 5:00 and 8:00, will get a vaccine.

If you come in here, the 501st car, we'll say, we're sorry we don't have a vaccine for you.

All the other sites remain appointment only.

We are seeing those appointments fill up and we're trying to do everything we can to drive some traffic through the Pipkin building to take advantage of this.

The challenges as you stated are, the lack of predictability is that we have to keep this in ultra-cold storage before we actually administer it.

We thaw these doses out and you wanna be precise with thawing them out because once a dose is thawed out, you only have five days to put it in someone's arm.

So if I was to open tomorrow the Pipkin and say, "Everybody come in, no appointment required."

I can give 3,000 and I might thaw 3,000 doses.

And if only a 1,000 people show up, that means at the end of the day, I have to take 2,000 doses back to the refrigerator and then I have five days to get those in people's arms.

So it becomes a little bit of a management difficulty.

We would, those would be the first doses we put out the next day, but that's the challenge with just completely opening up.

In addition to having a bet towards action and looking at the data as it unfolds before us and making incremental changes like today, we were opening from 5:00 to 8:00 PM.

We will examine this as it goes forward.

And we're always open to any changes that we might need to drive some demand there.

So the other sites remain the same policy that we've had for now, it only changes at the Pipkin building and we're hopeful that people will take advantage of both the appointments and the non-appointment availability that we have over the Pipkin site.

- Let me go to Director Sweat.

You addressed this I think and both of you did talk about, you know, trying to get people to these sites and working with MATA and working with employers and so on.

Last week we did a show and I mentioned Reverend Keith Norman also from Baptist Hospital System, as well as the the head of Meritan, which works with seniors and a lot of homebound seniors.

And Melanie from Meritan, the CEO there was talking about, I mean, if they get, you know, in the 100s a week of getting to homebound seniors, that's a win because it is so difficult.

Your thoughts, if you, and the approach that you all have taken to get to those people who either, they're not mobile, they don't have a family or friend who can get them to one of these sites.

They maybe aren't fully aware, right?

I mean, we all live in a world where we have cell phones and computers and not by no means does everyone have that.

So talk about that side of the effort.

- Okay, so what we're addressing is mostly through our health care navigator program.

That's the group that works, some people have heard of Radar, our CARES program, does outreach into the community.

So they've been working closely with Meritan and other organizations to reach these hard to reach populations.

And the influx of J & J has actually helped us with that.

It's very labor intensive and like I said, it takes a while to get around.

We have to plan the routes because once we draw the vaccine into a syringe, we have to get it into somebody's arm within, depending on which vaccine it is, within five to six hours.

So it's a very narrow window.

So we wanna make sure that we have zero doses wasted and that's very important to us.

And I'm proud to say that we've done very well at that week, but it is a tough management system to get those vaccines out.

Also, we have now what we're calling the community vaccination unit.

The healthcare navigators are using that to host events at different parts of town.

We've done at least three events in areas where people experiencing homeless gather and we've vaccinated over 250 people experiencing homelessness in our community with vaccines so far and a lot of outreach into the homebound community.

So that's a little bit of a slow process, but it's very worthwhile, it's very meaningful to those people who might not have opportunities otherwise.

And also a lot of people rely on MataPlus for transportation if they have some needs.

If you're a MataPlus, you can use the same number that you normally use to schedule a ride, and they will bring you to the Pipkin site and get you back home.

So anyone that uses MataPlus on a regular basis can use MataPlus, the regular call number and they will schedule you an appointment and pick you up or if you ride the bus, the MATA bus line, they will take you to the site there at on East Parkway at Young for, allow you to walk in and then you'll be reimbursed for your ride and given a coupon for your second dose ride as well.

So we're trying to, like I said we realized that transportation is a barrier for a lot of people in our community and we're trying every way we can to reduce that barrier and to give them opportunities to get to the Pipkin site.

- All right, lemme bring Bill back in.

- Director Sweat, is this effort more of a regional effort than it is a local effort?

And I'm talking about the overall vaccination effort.

With this volume of doses here, is this more regional?

- So, obviously we are responsible to the city of Memphis as our employers but this is a community-wide, this is a Shelby County effort.

There's lots of partners, both other suburban jurisdictions are all, we're all partnering together to bring the best for our community, but you're absolutely right Bill.

This, you know, the Memphis MSA, we have people coming from Mississippi, Arkansas into our community.

They either work in our community or travel through our community and they also could bring COVID into our community.

So we need to make sure, you know, as a regional, we are watching the numbers in the other areas in the community.

And so we, you know, it's best for our community that everybody within, especially within the MSA, that's gonna be conducting business or coming into our community is vaccinated to reduce that influx into our community.

- And Doug, to that point, this is why you all have and require some amount of information about who is getting the vaccination not only to keep track of first and second doses but to know how you're doing in reaching certain groups of people, regardless of where they might come from.

And a lot of Memphians have gone across the state line and two other counties in West Tennessee, as part of this process as well.

- Oh, that's a great point, Bill.

And as Gina said, these folks are all part of the community.

Whether you just work here and reside somewhere else or whether you live here and work somewhere else, it's important that everybody get vaccinated throughout the entire MSA.

And we do collect some data because it's important for us as you said, Bill, to know whether we are reaching the you know, we don't wanna just reach one population.

We wanna reach the entire population.

So we do a couple of things.

First, we collect zip code information so that we can tell in areas of the city, geographically where we're serving them or not serving them.

And when we talk about our community-based pods, we actually partner with an agency or a church that's in one of those zip codes that has the lowest uptake to try to drive vaccine to that neighborhood, to get bigger, better uptake.

With this new federal allocation, we're collecting a bit more information including some disability information, but because the focus of the program is really for social vulnerability and making sure that people will have social vulnerabilities are given the opportunity for a vaccine.

Memphis has a significantly high population with social vulnerabilities according to the federal calculation.

And so we're collecting that information just to make sure we're hitting the target and that the program is doing what it's intended to do.

I have no doubt that we can get 50 to 60,000 doses of vaccine on people's arms here.

We have the capability, the capacity, the vaccine.

We wanna make sure that everyone in every neighborhood and in every situation has the opportunity to take advantage of that.

So the data helps us make sure that there are no gaps in our delivery system.

- And that's 50 to 60,000 a week?

- Yes, sir!

The system that we built has the capacity to deliver at least that much vaccine.

We just need folks to come and take advantage of it.

- That 250, real briefly, the 250,000 give or take that we've hit in terms of vaccines given, does that include, that includes everything, that includes Walmart, that includes Kroger?

Does that include someone who lives in Memphis but got it in Mississippi, or is there some fuzziness there?

- So we've delivered more than 400,000 vaccinations here.

The TennIIS system, which is a state system, you asked a really good question Eric because that records the number of vaccinations that have been given to people who live in Shelby County.

So the actual number of vaccinations is more.

If you look at the website today, it says that there are 394,000.

We know that yesterday we did almost 7,000 vaccinations so we're well north of 400,000.

When CVS and Walmart, they do not report directly to us so I can't tell you how many they've done.

Eventually their information works its way into TennIIS, through Tiberius, which is a national system.

So it will eventually be recorded but I can't tell you on a day-to-day basis, how they're doing.

- In that 400, you had 394,000, that's 394 different people, or 394,000 shots?

- Shots, and it's 400,000.

'Cause as I said, the system shows 394 but yesterday we just put another 6 or 7,000 out.

So there's at least 250,000 people, at least, that have been vaccinated with one or two vaccines.

- Okay, that is all the time we have this week.

Remember you can get the full episode at wkno.org as well as past episodes.

You can also download the podcast from Daily Memphian site or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks and we'll see you next week.

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