County’s COVID vaccine lottery is ‘a total sham.’ Manatee’s seniors deserve better | Opinion
To: Manatee County Commissioners
Subject: Manatee County’s 65 and Older Lottery
I am an 80-year old resident of Manatee County since 2007, and I have underlying conditions that make COVID-19 a definite threat to my life. I am urging you in the strongest possible terms to switch over to the new State Vaccine Registration system as quickly as possible and abandon your 65 and older “lottery”. Contrary to the statement of Nick Azzara, your spokesman, that it would cause confusion for us to enroll in a separate system, enrolling in a separate system that would give us an indication of where we are in the line and when we might be vaccinated is exactly what we want, what we need, and what we deserve. There are apparently over 130,000 people 65 and older in the Manatee lottery. We have no idea whatsoever when we might be selected — it could be weeks, months, or even over a year at the current first dose vaccination rate for the county of about 250 per day this past week, based on the latest State Vaccination Report (through January 30, 2021, as of January 31, 2021), and that was all vaccinations, not just those for 65 or older!
We deserve to know where we are in the queue and the likely time frame in which we could get our vaccination. The lottery system is a total sham, which tells us nothing and completely hides the truth from your constituents who you purportedly represent! Anyone can do the math and see that if you continue at this appalling rate of 250 vaccinations per day and vaccinated only those 65 and older, it will take you 520 days to vaccinate all 130,000 of us, or a bit over 17 months! Even if you somehow manage to magically triple the rate starting on Monday to 750 vaccinations per day, and vaccinated only those 65 and older, it will still take a good five and a half months to vaccinate the 130,000 65 and older population in the lottery. No wonder you decided on the lottery system and are scared to death to go to a system with more visibility.
Although I have no evidence whatsoever that this is happening, your lottery system also could so easily be misused such that it is not really a lottery but a way to select specific individuals to be vaccinated, as there is no visibility whosoever into how it works, the selection process, etc. If, as the months go by and you are not selected, well that is just the “luck of the draw,” isn’t it? If you persist in using your lottery to select the individuals to make appointments to get the COVID-19 vaccine you do owe it to the 130,000 seniors 65 and older who are affected to let us know, with full transparency, who developed the lottery system that you are using, specifically how it works, who did the testing and certification to assure that it is not possible to be compromised and that it guarantees a fair and equal opportunity for each entrant to be selected each time another name is chosen. Also, who certified that your entire overall selection process is fair and unbiased with no parts of your procedures susceptible to being compromised? What other safeguards do you have in place to assure the integrity of your lottery selection process? How can we receive copies of detailed system descriptions, operational flows, tests and certifications?
It is past time for you to give the 65 and older residents of your county a fair and transparent system to register for the COVID-19 vaccine, as is being done everywhere else throughout the US, and which is likely to be a lifeline for a majority of us, and not keep us locked into this ridiculous game of chance that you have drummed up.
Lastly, it is also long overdue for you to make yourselves heard in Tallahassee and get us our fair share of the vaccines being distributed throughout the state. We have been receiving below the average of all the counties of the state from the start, and we remain so. Most important, this allocation to us is based on per capita population and does not even consider the renters in Manatee County, all of whom apparently qualify for the vaccine. Manatee County likely has more renters than any other county in the state with the possible exception of Sarasota County, and most counties have minimal numbers of renters in comparison, and yet the vaccine allocations to us appear to be based only on our resident population, which is truly appalling on the part of the state. Florida clearly is not providing us anywhere near what should be our fair allocation — and what could be as much as half again or more vaccines than we have been receiving, in order to provide for all of our renters, who we must vaccinate, as well as our residents.
We, your constituents, deserve better, and we need your help.
Pete Gross holds a Ph.D in computer sciene and spent the last 32 years of his career working for a Fortune 200 company whose primary focus was system development, systems integration, outsourcing and data center operation for multinational firms and a variety of state, U.S. government and foreign government clients. He retired as their chief technology officer. He now lives in Holmes Beach
This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 1:59 PM.