When Gov. Jay Inslee announced on Jan. 18 that Clark County would transform its local fairgrounds into a mass vaccination site, it was news to many — including some in the county health department.
As phone calls and emails poured in from the public, health officials themselves sought to figure out how — exactly — the state planned to turn the fairgrounds into a vaccine-a-thon in one week’s time.
“This whole week has been very busy and we’ve been working really hard to get information out as quickly as we can,” said Marissa Armstrong, a department spokesperson. “Things continue to happen and change very quickly.”
By Friday afternoon, few details have been made clear. County health officials say the state is in charge of the effort.
Meanwhile, state health officials did not respond to a handful of questions sent by OPB about who would run the facility, how many doses would be available, when it would open and how people could get their shot.
Previously, state health officials have said they plan for the site to be up-and-running on Monday. An official at the Clark County Fairgrounds said staff is communicating with the state and expect representatives to arrive soon but declined to elaborate.
The same confusion is hitting other health jurisdictions throughout the state.
In the lead-up to Inslee’s announcement, health departments knew he planned to announce that more people would become eligible for the vaccine, but did not know about any local vaccination sites, said Jaime Bodden, managing director of the Washington Association of Local Public Health Officials.
“We were aware of the broad strokes of the announcement that was coming around, about moving ahead to (the next phase of vaccinations),” Bodden said. It was moments before the press conference that some counties learned they needed to set up sites.
As in Clark County, health departments elsewhere heard phones going off the hook, Bodden said. One department’s website crashed.
“Those phone calls, they don’t get directed to the state. They call their local health departments,” she said. “I think the messaging could have been a lot more finessed.”
Confusion and miscommunication have been abundant throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, dating back to how government officials handled phased closures and unemployment benefits. At this stage, questions abound over vaccines: who gets them and when? How many are available?
“I think there’s a lot of things at play that stir up frustration,” Bodden said. She noted that agencies at both the state and local levels are all working toward the common goal of ending the pandemic.
Officials in Benton County, in southeastern Washington, told reporters they are still working out details for a mass vaccination site in the Tri-Cities.
In Spokane, the Spokane Arena will be another mass vaccinating site starting on Monday. A television news station asked Inslee on Thursday whether he intended for local health jurisdictions to learn about the sites at the same time as the public.
“Look, we’re moving as rapidly as we can here,” Inslee said. “Under normal days we would have had a normal discussion with the Spokane Health District, but we’ve got to move fast here.”
“We hope Monday — that’s not a sure thing, because we may not get doses in Monday from the federal government,” he added. “But I’m very confident we can get this going.”