Tag: Dr. Lisa Piercey

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State: No Harm From Expired Vaccines

CREDIT: Tero Vesalainen | Dreamstime

Tero Vesalainen | Dreamstime

A state health official said no harm will come to Shelby Countians who received an expired COVID-19 vaccine from the Shelby County Health Department, though the shot may be less effective.

Dr. Lisa Piercey, Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH), said Tuesday, March 2nd, that many from the Memphis area have contacted her office recently, worried they received an expired dose of the vaccine. Piercey said many have a paper record of their vaccine from the health department that shows their shot had expired, sometimes more than two weeks before they received it.

Piercey said her office investigated, and she believes many of these instances can be linked to a clerical error by the health department. Many sheets with an expired date were printed and taken to a vaccine site here, she said. However, TDH is not “resting on that assertion as a final decision. We’re verifying those cases ourselves.” But she said TDH believes the “vast majority” of the cases were clerical.
State of Tennessee

Dr. Lisa Piercey

“Nothing bad is going to happen if you get an expired vaccine,” Piercey said. “The worst thing that can happen is that the vaccine is not as effective as a temperature-controlled or unexpired vaccine would be.”

A state investigation of the health department’s management of the vaccine rollout here uncovered 2,400 doses that had to be discarded because they were allowed to be defrosted but weren’t used. State health officials found six instances of these expiration events in February. The investigation results in the resignation of SCHD director Alisa Haushalter on Friday, February 26th.

Piercey said her team and personnel from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are on the ground in Shelby County. They are pulling together data to help ensure the temperature integrity of vaccines here.

State of Tennessee

State officials will begin vaccinating those in the 1c population beginning Monday. The group includes those aged 16 and older with high-risk medical conditions like obesity, COPD, and diabetes. Piercey said this group includes more than 1.1 million Tennesseans and the state “unfortunately has high rates of chronic diseases.”

Moving into the next phase comes as a “large surplus” of vaccines are expected to flow to Tennessee in the next two to three weeks. This surge of vaccines includes the newly approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Piercey said.

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State Department of Health Pulls County Health Department Out of Vaccine-Distribution Loop

CREDIT: Tero Vesalainen | Dreamstime

In the wake of its most severe and prolonged weather emergency in recent history, Shelby County received another shock Tuesday with the announcement by the state Department of Health that the Shelby County Health Department has mismanaged storage, allocation, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccine. Tero Vesalainen | Dreamstime

Dr. Lisa Piercey, director of the TDH, said investigators from her department had, on an emergency weekend visit to Memphis, concluded that some 2,400 doses of temperature-sensitive Pfizer vaccine had been allowed to spoil before being distributed and were subsequently junked. The investigators had also determined that the Health Department was in possession of an inventory of some 50,000 doses — 30,000 more than the TDH had anticipated.

Those discoveries prompted a significant revision of how vaccines will be delivered henceforth to Shelby County, Piercey said. At least for the short run, they will not go to the Health Department for further allocation but will be delivered directly to the distribution sites of participating partners, which include the City of Memphis, UT Center for Health Sciences, and numerous other agencies, public and private, offering vaccination services.

Meanwhile, the TDH has dispatched personnel to embed with the Health Department as advisors. Piercey could offer no long-term prognosis on how long the new arrangement will last.

Dr. Shelley Fiscus of the TDH said that the spoiled Pfizer doses never left the premises of the in-house Health Department pharmacy that was the starting point of the local distribution network, but had been thawed along with doses that were distributed to vaccination sites. The surplus doses were refrigerated and then discarded after they had reached their expiration date.

This process occurred several times, beginning on February 3rd, and only on occasion could be blamed on the week of bad weather, the TDH investigation found. Poor “communication” was alleged to be a major cause of the spoliations.

Terming himself “absolutely supportive” of the state Department’s actions, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris pronounced the discovered disruptions “gut-wrenching” and said he had terminated the county’s site manager who had managed the relationship with the pharmacy and had also requested for the pharmacist “to be removed.” He also said he had launched an internal investigation to complement the state review.

A public chorus of indignation on social media sites, which had previously focused on criticism of the Health Department’s restrictions and had increased with the snafus at the Pipkin vaccination site (now and henceforth to be managed by city government in connection with UT) began to focus on the new revelations. And members of the Shelby County Commission, many of whom had withheld public criticism earlier, were coming forward with expressions of concern.

“There’s no excuse for having to dump the vaccine,” said Commissioner Van Turner, although he said, in taking note of hits that the Health Department’s Alisa Haushalter was taking, that she “could have been better supported.” Commissioner Mick Wright, who has often slammed the Health Department for “insensitivity” in its dealing with small businesses and citizens, called for the County Commission to be directly involved in the deliberations of the city-county Covid-19 task force.

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Lee Visits Memphis, Gives Status Report on Coronavirus Actions

GOP Governor Bill Lee paid a visit to Memphis Friday, where he provided a status report on the coronavirus pandemic in Tennessee and a summary of his administrative actions. Lee’s visit came as he garnered increasing criticism from the state’s Democratic minority in the now-suspended General Assembly. 

Governor Lee at Memphis Airport press briefing.

Some measure of the rapid spread and virulence
of the Covid-19 virus lay in the fact that the Democratic caucus members, in an open letter they circulated on Wednesday, wrote ominously of the “more than 700 cases” in the state, while Governor Lee and his state Health Commissioner, Lisa Piercey, used the figure of 1,203 to denote the number of state cases as of the time they spoke to reporters in an afternoon press conference at Memphis International Airport. (The rest of the statistical report, as of then: 103 hospitaliations, and six deaths.)

The Democratic legislators had been critical of Lee for not declaring a statewide “safer at home” order, allowing there to be “a patchwork or orders constructed by municipal governments.” Lee took what seemed to be at least indirect note of the criticism at the Friday press conference.

In a manner somewhat evocative of President Trump’s emphasis on economic factors, Lee said, “there’s a great degree of data that shows that healthcare is impacted in a negative way when people lose their jobs. There’s a reason why the majority of states do not have statewide stay at home orders.” He said, “What we’re doing in Tennessee, is have the right approach, the right decisions, the right time, the right place.” The reality in Tennessee, he said, was that “we are to a great degree shut down. … Every major population center has a stay-home order. The most populous counties in our state are all covered by stay-home orders, every restaurant dining room in the state, every bar, every school in Tennessee.”

In their letter, the Democrats charged that “In Tennessee, testing remains limited and is provided by a patchwork of often substandard options.” Lee and Piercey talked up several local testing options on Friday. The Governor noted that a testing site had opened that very day at Tiger Lane at the Fairgrounds, and Piercey pointed out that the various offices of the Christ Community Health Center in Memphis were providing testing.

Said the governor: ”There’s a lot of evidence that the cities in other countries and the countries themselves that have the greatest level of testing during this pandemic, those countries had the best outcomes with regard to flattening the curve. So testing is incredibly important.”

Called upon to account for emergency measures under way in Tennessee, state Adjutant General Jeff Holmes counted some 250 call-ups of National Guard members in the state. “We are leaning heavily on our medical professions, that’s combat medics, nurses, nurse practitioners, all the medical branches including portions of the 164th Air Wing here in Memphis. That’s going to be our heavy forward course.”

Piercey and Lee both warned of the fact that, as Lee noted, those “40 and younger tend to be, in this state, the largest percentage of those who test positive.” He continued: “It’s true young people tend to have less negative impacts as a result of this virus. The most vulnerable population are the elderly. And sometimes that can tend to create a mindset among the younger component of our population. That it just doesn’t matter that much to them because if they get sick, they’re probably not going to have anything but modest symptoms.”

Lee called that mindset “incredibly dangerous” in that “those that are young, those that do test positive … spread it to folks in the community … And the vulnerable will be infected as a result.”

The legislators’ letter asked for action on the issue of unemployment insurance. Lee noted that the omnibus stimulus passed by Congress (and at that point about to be signed by the President) on Friday, contained reassurances on that score.

The Democrats’ letter asked as well for additional medical personnel and expanded medical facilities. Though the letter did not dwell at length on the fact that the Tennessee General Assembly has never approved Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, state Democratic chair Mary Mancini and House Democratic caucus vice chair Antonio Parkinson of Memphis raised the issue as an imperative on Thursday in the first of what are proposed to be weekly online interactive chats.

In essence, the Democrats called for ”clear guidance and a statewide plan” and made it clear that they thought Lee had not provided one. For his part, the governor proclaimed that state government, along with Tennesseans at large, “have taken the steps necessary to provide for the safety of citizens and we’re doing a lot. We’re doing a lot in this state. And we’re encouraged by the outcomes already.”