INDIANAPOLIS — State health officials are doubling down on eligibility restrictions for the COVID-19 vaccine.
The assertions come in the same week that leaders lowered the age threshold for eligibility to 60, broadly making the shots available to many more thousands of people and creating a rush among those in the new cohort to make appointments for their inoculations.
Without enough vaccine for all Hoosiers, state health commissioner Dr. Kristina Box said Wednesday that officials are stressing adherence to the state’s vaccine rollout plan that bases shot eligibility on age, rather than moving up teachers and other essential workers as other states have done.
Several clinics that have “ignored” those guidelines will not receive any more first-dose vaccines, Box said, though she declined to indicate where or how many such vaccination sites would be affected.
Box said state health officials are reaching out to other clinics that have deviated from the eligibility guidelines “to find out why and, to re-educate them about the importance of following the state’s priority list” when scheduling appointments and adding names to waiting lists.
“We are not trying to be the vaccine police; that is the last thing we want to be,” Box said. “We are trying to ensure that we have ethical and equitable access to the vaccine across all 92 counties, based on what the data show are the highest-risk individuals here in the state of Indiana. We cannot achieve that goal if sites deviate from the guidelines.”
The state health department’s chief medical officer, Dr. Lindsay Weaver, said clinics have additionally been instructed to stop administering first doses of COVID-19 vaccine to people who live in other states to ensure “that every dose received in Indiana goes to Hoosiers.”
Around 19,000 health-care workers and first-responders who work in Indiana but live in other states were inoculated, Weaver said. Those out-of-state workers will still be able to schedule and receive their second dose, but no new appointments will be scheduled for non-residents.
After a winter storm closed more than 80 clinics and disrupted upwards of 43,000 vaccine appointments last week, Box said Indiana has since received all delayed doses of vaccine, and regular weekly allotments have resumed.
State officials anticipated 247,000 doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this week, Weaver said Wednesday. Accounting for new additional doses of Pfizer vaccine vials, that number is expected to increase to 267,000 beginning next week.
Indiana could also receive vials of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as early as next week, she continued.
After vaccine eligibility opened to include Hoosiers aged 60 to 64 on Tuesday, Weaver said nearly 112,000 people in the age group have scheduled appointments, accounting for more than a fourth of the eligible population in that age bracket.
Nearly 921,000 Hoosiers have received their first dose of vaccine, an increase of nearly 87,000 from last week, Weaver said. Around 480,000 people across Indiana are now fully vaccinated.
As Indiana’s rates of new COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths continued a steep decline after peaking in early December, state health officials also lowered the risk level for COVID-19 spread in nearly all counties.
Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb announced Wednesday that despite “remarkable” progress to state statistics in that last month, he will still extend extend the state’s health emergency and county-based restrictions for an additional 30 days.
“We were trending in the right direction. We have made remarkable progress in a relatively short period of time,” Holcomb said. “But this is not a mission accomplished moment — far from it.”
