‘Do the math’: Baker administration clashes with Massachusetts teachers unions over vaccine distribution plan
"We're just not going to play that game."
K-12 school and child care workers became fully eligible Thursday to sign up for COVID-19 vaccine appointments in Massachusetts.
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However, as Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration moves to require elementary and middle schools to resume in-person classes five days a week beginning next month, teachers unions say the state should do more to quickly vaccinate educators.
And it has opened a contentious new front in the simmering tensions between the Baker administration and the state’s powerful teachers unions, who say the governor is “pitting” groups against each other.
Currently, teachers can try to obtain a scarce appointment at any of the 170 vaccination sites for eligible statewide populations, as well as pharmacies like CVS that receive doses separately through the federal government. The Baker administration is also planning four days — March 27, April 3, April 10, and April 11 — when the state’s seven mass vaccination sites and other providers will reserve appointments solely for eligible educators.
Still, Baker has said it will likely take until at least mid-April before everyone in the currently eligible group secures an appointment, due to limited national supply as vaccine manufacturers ramp up production.
In response, the state’s largest teachers unions, the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, have put forward an alternative proposal: distribute doses to local sites — similar to what the state did for first responders during Phase 1 of the rollout — and have trained EMTs and firefighters administer the vaccines to teachers. The two unions also suggested piloting the program in 10 to 20 of the school districts with the highest COVID-19 rates.
MTA President Merrie Najimy said Wednesday that the “last mile” plan would be “more efficient and equitable, all while minimizing disruption to student services and the public’s access to mass vaccination sites.”
The Baker administration, which is already putting millions of dollars into a vaccination program focused on the state’s 20 hardest hit communities, says the plan would do the opposite.
In a strongly worded statement Thursday afternoon, Tim Buckley, a senior adviser to the Republican governor, said the administration was “dismayed that despite reasonable efforts to prioritize educator vaccinations, the teachers’ unions continue to demand the Commonwealth take hundreds of thousands of vaccines away from the sickest, oldest and most vulnerable residents in Massachusetts and divert them to the unions’ members.”
Buckley noted that 95 percent of Massachusetts teachers are under the age of 65.
“Building an entirely new, exclusive, teacher-only, school by school distribution system would make Massachusetts’ vaccination system slower, less equitable and far more complicated,” he said, imploring the unions “to do the math.”
Officials say the state is getting about 150,000 first doses each week through the federal government, and they don’t expect shipments to significantly increase until at least late March. And while Baker said Thursday that the state has vaccinated 75 percent of residents over the age of 75 and “almost 50 percent” of those over the age of 65, there’s still around 1 million residents eligible to be vaccinated, including educators and residents with multiple qualifying medical conditions.
“Diverting hundreds of thousands of vaccines to an exclusive, teacher-only distribution system would deny the most vulnerable and the most disproportionately impacted residents hundreds of thousands of vaccines,” Buckley said.
After a slow start to the state’s vaccine rollout, Massachusetts now ranks first in the nation for both first and total doses administered per capita amongst the states with more than 5 million people, largely due to the shift toward mass vaccination sites. Baker has defended the initially slow start, which he attributes to the state’s unique decision to prioritize vulnerable residents and staff at prisons and congregate care facilities that serve homeless people and residents with developmental disabilities or mental health issues, in addition to health care workers, those at nursing homes, and first responders.
“All took time,” Baker said during a press conference Thursday. “But it was important work”
However, the administration suggested Thursday that teachers did not merit that same targeted prioritization, as Massachusetts (and other states dogged by initially slow vaccine rollouts) pivots toward a higher-efficiency approach.
“I am not going to be in a position where I take vaccine away from people who are extremely vulnerable — who have multiple medical conditions and are over the age of 65 — to give it to a targeted population,” Baker said. “We’re just not going to play that game.”
Baker has also repeatedly pointed to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that say teacher vaccinations are not required to safely resume in-person classes if face-covering and social-distancing measures are implemented, amid concerns about the adverse academic and mental health impacts of sustained remote learning.
The governor’s office also noted that a December report found that no community outbreaks in the country had been traced to an elementary school, and that “contact tracing studies have found that children are almost never the source in infection clusters.” While two studies released late last month suggested the previous research may have undercounted infection rates among children since most are asymptomatic, Baker’s administration has launched a first-in-the-nation surveillance pool testing program for schools this winter, which half of the state’s districts have adopted.
“They were looking for their own vaccine, and to not participate in the process that everybody else participates in,” Baker said of the teachers unions’ vaccine proposal, adding that the current distribution process in Massachusetts is the same as rollouts in “virtually every other state in the country.”
“It’s effective, it’s efficient, and it gets lots of shots in people’s arms in a short period of time,” he said.
The full-force rebuke from Baker’s office came after the teachers unions had what ATF-Massachusetts President Beth Kontos described as a “very cordial meeting” Thursday morning with Massachusetts Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders about their proposal.
During a WBUR appearance Thursday afternoon, Kontos called Baker’s reaction “extreme” and refuted the suggestion that the unions were trying to take vaccines away from “the elderly or hard-hit populations.”
“Quite frankly, it’s untrue and defamatory,” she said.
In a subsequent joint statement Thursday afternoon, the MTA, AFT-Massachusetts, and Boston Teachers Union said they had suggested Thursday morning to Sudders that the reallocated doses for their last-mile plan come from the 25,000 doses that were being reserved for the state’s four designated educator vaccination days. That idea had not been originally included in the last-mile plan, which was released in mid-February, a month before it become clear that the state would hold educator-only vaccination days.
Still, the teachers unions said Thursday they “never advocated for educators to ‘skip the line’ or be prioritized ahead of the sick and elderly.” While the vast majority of educators are under the age of 65, the group also said that the Baker administration’s statistics overlook teachers with underlying health conditions or those with sick or elderly family members to whom they could spread the deadly disease.
“It is sad, and frankly, reckless that on the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down our state, Governor Charlie Baker is pitting one vulnerable group against another,” the statement said.
Kontos also noted that the 40,000 appointments made available Thursday for the state’s mass vaccination sites next week, which were completely filled within three hours, did not open up until 8:30 a.m.
“Every educator in Massachusetts is working at 8:30 in the morning,” she told WBUR.
Baker said Thursday that roughly 158,000 vaccine doses are being distributed for appointments next week at local health boards, regional collaboratives, and pharmacies in the federal partnership (the latter of which accounts for 95,000 doses).
This week was also the last time that the administration will release mass vaccination appointments in bulk on Thursday morning. Beginning on Friday, the state is launching a preregistration system through which eligible residents can sign up to get in line ahead of time and receive a notification when a mass vaccination site appointment in their area becomes available.
The preregistration system, which puts eligible residents in line on a “first come, first serve” basis, will go live Friday morning. Officials, including Baker, have declined to say exactly when.
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