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Pharmacies react to governor's vaccination goal

Governor Wolf set a goal for providers to have an appointment on the books for everyone in Phase 1A by the end of the month.

Gov. Tom Wolf is asking pharmacies to get thousands of people off their waiting lists in the next two weeks.

He wants everyone who's eligible to receive the vaccine in the first phase to have an appointment scheduled by March 28.

"As a provider, we're the ones that ultimately are responsible to look the patient in the eye, and I don't want to over-promise and under-deliver for my patients," said Tom DePietro, owner of DePietro's Pharmacy in Dunmore.

DePietro says all signs point to the vaccine supply increasing in the weeks ahead, but pharmacists are generally reluctant to schedule too far in advance, especially after what happened last month when thousands of appointments had to be postponed due to a shortage of second doses.

"So I've taken the notion that I will schedule once I have vaccine in hand, so it's a, it's a bit of a trust factor that we have to trust that we're going to get the exact amount of vaccine weekly from the state," said DePietro.

The owner of Hometown Health Care in Covington Township says the good news is, the supply is there, now it's just a matter of making thousands of time-consuming phone calls to schedule people.

"We have a list of about 10,000 people now that our staff and our volunteers are working and calling everybody but if you think about, it takes anywhere from at least 1-4 minutes to call someone, to go through that process and get them scheduled x 10,000, I mean even if we called 24/7, I don't know if we'd have that done by March 28, at this point," said Allyson Favuzza.

Both pharmacists we spoke to agree that scheduling just for the sake of scheduling is not necessarily what we should be focused on.

"Scheduling out far, I don't think is helpful. As many of you know, you'll be on a list somewhere and then you know, you might get the call to come tomorrow, which is great but you might have an appointment 2 weeks out with us, so that's not very helpful in the long run," said Favuzza.

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