Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker Press Conference Transcript March 3

Speaker 1: (00:00)
[inaudible 00:00:00].

Governor Baker: (00:00)
To the Mayor, the Superintendent, I just want to say thank you so much for having us here today to celebrate the 101st day of in-person instruction here at West Parish. And the symbol for today, because it’s the 101st day, is 101 Dalmatians. So as we wandered around the school, we saw a lot of black dots-

Speaker 2: (00:39)
Polka dots.

Polka dots, just about everywhere we looked. And it was really terrific to have a chance to not just talk to the kids, but also talk to some of the parents and some of the teachers and administrators about how they did it, and how it’s working, and what a benefit it’s been to so many of the kids and the families in the school district here. So congratulations to you folks for all the really fine work you’ve done over the course of this year, and a lot of gratitude from the Lieutenant Governor and me on all of the above.

Quick update here on the vaccine story. We’ve received just over two million total doses of COVID-19 vaccine, and we’ve administered over 1.8 million doses so far, which means 88% of our total supply has ended up in somebody’s arm. We’re currently number one among the 24 states that have more than five million people, and we remain in the top 10 for doses administered nationwide. Very few states are administering as many doses every day as we’re administering here in Massachusetts, and it’s paying off and case rates are dropping.

Yesterday was the first day in I can’t remember how long that we had zero new COVID cases in our long-term care system. As many of you know, the FDA authorized the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for emergency use. The latest information we have on the J & J vaccine is that states won’t be receiving large quantities on a regular basis until sometime around the end of March or beginning of April. That’s obviously not what we wanted to hear in the short term, but having a safe and highly effective vaccine that’s only a single dose will make an enormous difference once it’s widely available in speeding up the vaccination process. And we all know how high the demand is for vaccines generally. We’re doing what we can to speed it up, but we can only go as fast as the federal government’s supply.

Federal government really isn’t increasing production much in the month of March. As I said, we don’t expect to receive any more than the 56,000 doses of J&J we got until the end of March. And at this point in time, the number of vials we get remains pretty flat, but we’ve managed to squeeze six doses out of a vial instead of five, so instead of getting about 135,000 first doses a week, we can manage to squeeze 150,000 first doses out of the same number of vials. We are putting every dose we get to work and doing it quickly. And as I said, as a result, we’ve seen big improvements in our positive case counts, and our daily case counts, and in our hospitalization rates.

We’re here today in Gloucester today. We’re back in Gloucester today, is probably a better way to put it-

Speaker 2: (03:32)
Thank you.

… to celebrate the 101st day of in-person learning here, and just finished a terrific tour, which students and parents and teachers all had a chance to explain to us how terrific this has been. And I just want to say to everybody in Gloucester what a tremendous job you’ve done, bringing kids, and teachers, and staff safely back into the classroom, by following protocols, by being creative, and finding ways to simply make it happen. And obviously we look forward to seeing a lot more kids get back in school between now and the end of the year.

This Friday, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will be meeting to discuss giving Commissioner Riley the authority to determine when remote learning satisfies learning requirements for elementary schools, starting in April. Around 80% of the schools in Massachusetts are in some form of hybrid or in-person learning models, but obviously we’d like to see more kids back in class more often.

And as everybody knows, yesterday, the Biden-Harris administration announced that K through 12 educators, school staff, and childcare workers would be made eligible for vaccines, and our administration has prioritized educators and early childcare workers through our state vaccine distribution plan. In fact, they are next on the list, following the current group of 65 plus, and people with two comorbidities. In an effort to streamline our process and to limit the amount of confusion between federal eligibility guidelines, and state eligibility guidelines, and to coordinate with the feds, we’re announcing that educators, early educators, and school staff will be eligible to begin signing up for vaccine appointments starting on March 11, which is next week.

Speaker 2: (05:21)
Yes! Sorry. Sorry.

For the record, my good friend, the Mayor of Gloucester, managed to go almost 15 minutes without saying something, which for those of you who know her well-

Speaker 2: (05:38)
That’s a lot.

I’m really impressed with your discipline this morning, Mayor.

Speaker 2: (05:43)
I love the teachers. I’m sorry.

Yes, I know. When appointments are released next week on Thursday, K through 12 teachers, childcare workers and school staff will be eligible to sign up at all 170 vaccination sites that are open to all eligible residents around the Commonwealth. Additionally, the Command Center will designate specific days at mass vaccination sites for educators to get their shots, and we’ll have more details on that as we work them out.

This group of workers consists all-in of about 400,000 people, which means another 400,000 residents will become eligible to book appointments starting on March 11. They’ll join several of the other currently eligible groups, including everybody over the age of 65, and the folks with two or more certain health conditions who have been working their way through the system for the past couple of weeks.

The 65 plus group and the two health conditions group between them represent about a million residents. So far, we’ve received enough vaccine to vaccinate so far one-third of the folks in that category. The math on this is pretty straightforward. If we add 400,000 people on March 11 to the eligible pool, that’ll mean we’ll be back to having about a million people who are eligible to receive a vaccine. And as I said, we currently get about 150,000 first doses per week from the federal government. The message governors got yesterday is that we should not expect a significant increase in supply until the end of March. Therefore, it will probably take a while for all the folks who are part of this eligibility group to work their way through the system. Our estimates would be first dose appointments would probably start to cover pretty much everybody in that group about a month after they’re eligible.

We do want to make this change to be consistent with the Biden-Harris Administration’s directive. We don’t want people to be confused. And while here in Massachusetts, we’ve been a national leader with respect to how fast and how efficiently we can administer doses, the fact remains we’re still only going to get about 150,000 first doses every week. We’d like everybody to get vaccinated as quickly as possible, but it will take time to move the current folks who are left in the 65 plus and two co-morbidity categories who want to get vaccinated through the system, as well as the 400,000 educators who would be part of this group. It’s also critically important for everybody to understand the vaccines remain available for older adults and individuals with certain medical conditions. The data on this one is clear. These folks are far more vulnerable to this virus than just about anybody else, and they need to be vaccinated as quickly and as soon as possible to prevent serious illness, and in unfortunate circumstances, death. Right now, even with the approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the numbers of doses coming into Massachusetts will remain relative-

In the numbers of doses coming into Massachusetts will remain relatively consistent over the course of the next three or four weeks, which are obviously not enough to vaccinate everybody who would like to be vaccinated today. There’s a lot of excitement about the J&J vaccine. And I’m first on the list to have an opportunity to put to use and deploy a single shot vaccine and having a third manufacturer in the process over time will make a really big difference, but Massachusetts had been notified by the feds that we’re only scheduled to get one shipment, which we got this week of 58,000 doses for the month of March. And that has been distributed primarily to hospitals, health systems, some community health centers, and allocated basically to be used over the course of the next week. And we don’t expect to get any more until the end of March or the beginning of April.

Obviously that timeline may change, we certainly hope that it does, but that is the current guideline that we’ve been given by the federal government yesterday. We currently have the capacity, and I said this before, to administer far more doses than we currently receive. We hope that we will see a significant increase at some point in the future, because we do have the ability to dramatically scale the number of people who get vaccinated in Massachusetts, but we can only vaccinate with what we get from the feds. Now coordinating a program for the entire country is obviously a complicated task. It’s the most ambitious vaccine rollout in our nation’s history.

It’s never been done before and the stakes have never been higher as our state, and the nation, and the world desperately wants to put an end to the pandemic. The process has been difficult, but through the frustrations, we should all keep in mind that if we are patient, everyone who wants one will eventually get one. People at every level of government are working this and working it hard and so are many of their colleagues in the private sector who provide the opportunity for people to get vaccinated in so many different locations here in Massachusetts.

There are many factors that play into how states and communities approach the process, but everybody’s basically chasing the same goal. And we’ll keep working to administer every dose we get as quickly as possible to expand capacity and to make sure everybody knows when and where they can get their vaccines. We do want to make sure that there’s not a lot of confusion between federal eligibility standards and state eligibility standards, so we will follow suit with the feds to be consistent, but we obviously need a lot more doses a lot sooner than the current guidelines that have been applied to us by the feds if we’re truly going to make our way through this group as quickly as possible. And rest assured that people will get their vaccine, but people will need to be patient unless there’s a big change in the available supply in the near future. And with that, thank you again for having us here. We really appreciated it. It was great. And do you guys have questions?

Speaker 3: (12:14)
Governor, [inaudible 00:12:14] any problems with the vaccine [inaudible 00:12:14]? But also [inaudible 00:12:14] 24/7 and then we see that a lot of the people who get vaccines [inaudible 00:12:26].

Well, first of all, we vaccinated on first doses a larger percentage of our population than any other big state in the country. I think the program we’ve put in place has been enormously effective is making sure we put shots in arms. As I said in my remarks, 88% of all the vaccine that we’ve received has been administered. And we have many locations around the Commonwealth that people can pursue to get vaccinated. Our problem, and this is a problem in every state in the country, is there more people who want to get vaccinated than there is supply available to vaccinate them with. And if the feds do in fact manage to enhance the timeframe that’s associated with how they distribute it, I can promise you this, we have plenty of capacity to put every dose we get to work.

Speaker 4: (13:24)
Governor, teachers have to compete with everybody else who’s already authorized starting next week. Are they going to have to go onto the website that [inaudible 00:13:37] Or are you going to create a fast lane for them, making sure that they can get vaccinated? [inaudible 00:13:39] at the workplace, like healthcare workers did early on?

Remember there’s still significant numbers of people who are over the age of 65 and have two comorbidities that under the CDC guidelines put them as significant risk of hospitalization and death associated with COVID. And in Massachusetts, 90% of the people who died of COVID so far were over the age of 65. We want everybody who’s part of these groups to get vaccinated, but unless we get a significant about of additional supply, it’s going to take a while for people to work their way through the system.

Speaker 5: (14:15)
[crosstalk 00:14:15].

Speaker 5: (14:15)
Website as of this morning were able to sign up. On the CVS website application, it says that teachers are eligible. So, have CVS [inaudible 00:14:28]?

No, everybody is still playing more or less by the same rules. And if you’re eligible in Massachusetts, you’re still eligible in Massachusetts to use CVS, Walgreens, any other retail pharmacies. But they’re adding, as we’re planning to do as well, educators to that community.

Speaker 6: (14:44)
Governor, is this something that you would have done had the Biden-Harris administration not announced this directly yesterday? Because [inaudible 00:14:54] you’ve been following on this for a long time. And then separately you mentioned specific days for educators at these mass sites, [inaudible 00:15:02] teaching. I’m wondering how they’re going to [inaudible 00:15:03] an appointment [inaudible 00:15:07].

Well, first of all, the education community was right after the 65 plus and the folks with two comorbidities on our list. And remember, our list came from an advisory panel here in Massachusetts that prioritized, first of all, preserving life. And the data is simply overwhelming. The people over the age of 65 and people with multiple comorbidities are the ones who are most likely to be hospitalized and most likely to die. And we felt it was really important that they be dealt with early in this process. I don’t want people to get confused about where they can go and where they can’t go if the federal rules associated with some of this are different. So we’re going to move up the educator community, give them the ability to start booking appointments starting next week.

Speaker 6: (15:56)
What about the mass vaccination sites, like with specific days for educators [inaudible 00:16:00] even and also [inaudible 00:16:05] J&J vaccine [inaudible 00:16:06].

Well, keep in mind that the J&J vaccine, as I said, we got 58,000 doses. They’ve been allocated to primarily healthcare providers. And we’re not going to get any more until the end of March or beginning of April, which falls outside the timeframe that the President talked about wanting to see everybody in the education community get vaccinated. If that changes, obviously it makes it possible to do other things. Although I also want to see us use that J&J vaccine to do some mobile vaccination work, because of the ease associated with storing it, and preparing it, and getting out into some housebound areas, and some shut-ins, and people who typically can’t get to any site. I think with respect to the way we’ve been thinking about creating days, we would probably put them on weekends when people aren’t in school and do it that way.

Speaker 7: (17:06)
Governor, has the Biden administration [inaudible 00:17:07] for teachers?

Not yet. No, they’ve not… I mean, we were on the phone with the Biden administration for an hour yesterday, and this didn’t come up at all. First we heard about it was the tweet yesterday afternoon.

Speaker 7: (17:21)
[inaudible 00:17:21] given that he didn’t [inaudible 00:17:21] at some point [inaudible 00:17:33]?

Well, that’s one of the reasons why we moved up the eligibility date, so that it will be reasonably consistent with the eligibility date that he’s talked about. But he’s talking about it as an add-on, he’s not talking about it as a substitute.

Speaker 8: (17:45)
[inaudible 00:17:45] For students to return to the classroom next month and it sound like-

K-5, right.

Speaker 8: (17:51)
K-5, right. But it doesn’t like teachers and Mayor [inaudible 00:17:55] everybody else would necessarily be vaccinated. Do you expect [inaudible 00:18:03]?

People have been here for 101

Speaker 9: (18:03)
Do you expect some resistance?

People have been here for 101 days, there are schools all over Massachusetts that have been operating in person since September, and have done a really terrific job of managing COVID along the way. We’ve also made available to any school district that wants it, and any school that wants it, a weekly surveillance program that the State is paying for to begin with. And locals can use some of the federal money they’ve got to pay for it if they choose to use it going forward. And the CDC’s own guidelines with respect to reopening schools, don’t require vaccinations for schools to be reopened.

Speaker 10: (18:37)
Governor. Will that still be considered a mass vaccination?

We’re talking to the folks at Fenway right now about how to handle the issue associated with fans in games. And I think we’ll have more to say about that shortly. But the bottom line is everybody who needs a second dose is going to get a second dose. And if we need to move the way we handle first dosing and second dosing going forward, we’ll find another place in the city to.

Speaker 11: (19:06)
We’ve seen several states roll back on the mask mandate. Do you have any stance on the mask mandate?

I think the mass mandate has been an important element in both encouraging behavior, but also sending a message about the importance of recognizing and understanding that COVID is still very much with us and people need to take precautions. And especially with the new variants that are out there, which all the vaccines so far appear to work on. Some of the new variants are even more contagious than some of this stuff we’ve been dealing with for the past 10 months, 11 months, 12 months. And We have no plans at this point in time to change the rules with respect to the mask mandate.

Speaker 4: (20:03)
[inaudible 00:20:03] Set aside a certain percentage of vaccine for educators and staff. Is that something that you considered?

She also said that when we got new doses, we’re not getting new doses. Okay. I can’t make that point clear enough. In the current environment we’re operating in, where we have very limited constraints around supply, we have a number of groups that we believe, based on the guidance we got from the CDC and the work that was done by our panel here in Massachusetts, are very significantly at risk of hospitalization and death associated with COVID. Those folks need to continue to be able to access vaccines at the 170 sites where vaccines are available in Massachusetts. We don’t want to create confusion. We do want to see educators get vaccinated. We’re going to move them up ahead of all the other groups that are part of the next phase of phase two, next step in phase two, to begin being able to schedule appointments next week.

But I don’t see how we can choose to take vaccines away from people who are over the age of 65 and significantly at risk of hospitalization and death from COVID, or people who have two comorbidities, many of which have already been proven time and time again, to be terribly dangerous when it comes to COVID and not include them going forward in the process. Now we think teachers should absolutely be part of the game starting next week, and they’ll be able to make appointments. And if the feds dramatically increase supply to help states deliver on this directive from the White House, that would be terrific. Because we have the capacity in Massachusetts to do far more vaccinating than we actually have available vaccine.

Speaker 12: (22:06)
By moving people up, you said it’s 400,000 more people-

Well, keep in mind, it’s not just teachers. It’s educators, staff, childcare workers. It’s a big universe.

Speaker 12: (22:17)
By moving that group up, does it set everyone else back?

If the supply numbers don’t change. Yeah. The thing people need to remember here is we only get the same number of vials we’ve been getting for the past few weeks. Now we can get sick shots instead of five out of the Pfizer vials, which is how we get to 150,000 doses, first doses. But part of what made part of what made all of us so excited about the J&J product was the single dose and the possibility to dramatically increase available supply in a really short period of time. But the message we got yesterday was we got this 58,000 doses, which we allocated mostly to provider organizations, and we’re not going to see any additional J&J that we can order until at least the end of March. Now, maybe at the end of March we’ll get a really big number that comes from the J&J production deal with Merck or something like that.

If that happens, that’s a big deal because it’s one shot. And I can’t emphasize how big a deal one shot is relative to two. It’s not just about convenience. It’s also about how you’re putting your doses to work. And if we could get to the point where J&J is playing a really big role, and we have a ton of one dose vaccine, that will make a really big difference. Just think about every single person who’s been vaccinated so far had to go back and get a second vaccine. So we’ve administered 1.8 million shots in Massachusets. About 1.2 million have been first doses. And there are about 550, 600,000 people who are fully dosed. If this was all one shot, instead of having 550,000 or 600,000 people who are fully vaccinated, we’d have 1.8 million people who are fully vaccinated. So the one shot thing makes a big difference. And if there’s a lot more of that supply that shows up, it will make a big difference here and everywhere else.

Speaker 13: (24:27)
You asked to get a better view of supply chain a couple of weeks ago. Are you getting that at all?

Well, honestly, the news yesterday about J&J was a big surprise to everybody. We thought we were going to see… And this was covered pretty extensively in the media. J&J had very significant commitments that they made as part of their financial support, part of the financial support they received under Operation Warp Speed. And a lot of us were anticipating that once they got approved, they would be delivering on the commitments that were made under that arrangement. They’re way less than half than what was originally presumed to be coming in the month of March on the J&J side. Now maybe they’ll make up for it in April.

But if I’ve learned anything since the start of this, it’s how important it is for people who want a vaccine to get it, how important it is to put it into the arms of people who either are at risk themselves or work with people who are at risk. And we’ve done a pretty good job on both of those things in Massachusetts, which I think will make a difference on hospitalizations and case counts and deaths and all the other things that we talk about when we talk about the consequences of COVID generally. But the big challenge here is available supply. And it’s been that way now for, well, more or less since the beginning.

Speaker 14: (26:13)
Do you recommend to wait until the 11th to get their appointment, as opposed to going at the moment, right now?

If somebody can get an appointment, they should get an appointment. And by the way, they should also take whichever vaccine is available. This is something that the CDC, the FDA, the medical community, everybody has basically said. If you get an appointment, take the vaccine that’s available. They all work on hospitalization and death, which are the two things we should all worry about the most. But part of the reason people do talk about the importance of continuing to wear a mask. Even after people get vaccinated, is one of the things the vaccine does is it prevents you from getting sick, which is great. One of the things nobody knows at this point is whether if you are in fact infected and you don’t get sick and you don’t show symptoms, even if you’ve been vaccinated-

… and you don’t show symptoms, even if you’ve been vaccinated, are you still somebody who could carry it and give it to somebody else who’s not vaccinated? And that’s being studied right now in a number of the countries that are a little bit ahead of the U.S. in terms of their population that’s been vaccinated. So that’s another reason why I think the mask mandate in particular… The mask mandate has nothing to do with whether or not the vaccine is effective. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

If you have a whole bunch of people who get vaccinated, but could still carry the virus and theoretically give it to somebody else and show no signs, that puts people who haven’t been vaccinated or people who remain part of a vulnerable population that hasn’t been vaccinated at risk. So I think the mask mandate, at least until we get some answers on whether or not people who’ve been vaccinated can actually pass this on to somebody else, is a perfectly reasonable and appropriate place for us to continue to operate in.

Speaker 4: (28:03)
[crosstalk 00:28:03] governors in other states saying we don’t need a mask mandate, things reopening slowly, schools getting back. Is there a danger out here that people are going to put down their guard [inaudible 00:28:16]?

So, I mean, I certainly hope people don’t put down their guard. I mean, some of the decisions that we made with respect to our guidance around here in Massachusetts was really simply going back to where we were in the fall. Okay?

We left in place many of the criteria and many of the guideposts and the standards and the advisories that have been in place all along. And we left some of the ones that we added in December in place as well. It’s still 90 minutes in a restaurant, which six people, no more at a table. I think what I would say is that the vaccines, the more we do to serve vulnerable populations and to take the folks who are most likely to get really sick, be hospitalized and die. The more we vaccinate those folks and create a certain level of additional safety for them, the more likely it will be that we won’t see significant burdens on the healthcare system.

We won’t see significant numbers of people getting sick and dying, which is great. But at the end of the day, this is still an incredibly contagious virus and people need to take it seriously until we get to the point where we have vaccinated a very significant portion of our population. Now, if we get a ton of J&J in April and Pfizer and Moderna continue to up their numbers in April and May and June, we have the infrastructure to vaccinate millions of people in Massachusetts.

Speaker 15: (30:08)
To be clear, at this point, no doses set aside for educators, no special days [inaudible 00:30:08]?

No, there will be special days.

Speaker 15: (30:12)
What are those special days?

We’re still figuring that out. We just heard about this yesterday.

Speaker 16: (30:29)
Thanks everybody.

Speaker 17: (30:30)
[inaudible 00:30:30] is that a fair way to distribute on these vaccines [inaudible 00:30:35]?

The protocols that are in place at this point are much better than they were at that point in time. I mean, they all went to people who are eligible, but I don’t expect or anticipate that we’ll be seeing that sort of activity or that sort of behavior in the future. And we shouldn’t. We don’t need to, we have better protocols now. We understand more about how to handle this. And I think in some ways with COVID and with the first time on so many of the issues associated with this, we continue to learn the right way to do a number of things. And that’s one more.

Speaker 16: (31:12)
Thanks everybody.

Speaker 18: (31:14)
[crosstalk 00:31:14] if there are special days set aside, wouldn’t that mean that there are appointments set aside for [inaudible 00:31:19] appointments that will be reserved?

Correct. Well, educators.

Speaker 18: (31:23)
Perfect. Can we get your reaction [inaudible 00:31:30]?

Speaker 19: (31:29)
Well, I’m kind of biased because we’re in Gloucester. And my teachers and educators have been working since day one. So I’ve been actually with the superintendent trying to figure out something we can do, because I feel that where everyone’s saying, well, if you want us to go back to school, then we need to be vaccinated. But my teachers have been. They’ve been in school, they’ve been doing everything and following the protocol. And I wanted to get them first.

Speaker 19: (31:56)
And I was joking around and said, ‘Don’t nobody get upset.” I says, “Let’s see, I’ll give you my high blood pressure. I’ll give you smoking.” And joking around because it’s true though. I’ve been actually… I’m also an MRC volunteer and I’ve been doing from 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM, registering people who are 65 and plus. We have a lot of people who are… And I’m asking people, please do not go online. You get through and what’s happening. They’re making appointments all over and then they’re not showing up.

Speaker 19: (32:25)
And that’s what’s got to stop. You can’t go online and say, “I’m going to go [inaudible 00:32:30]. I’m going to go here. I’m going to go here. I’m going to here.” And then finally you have something sooner. And then nobody knows. So what we’re trying to do is all those appointments, we’re now pulling 75 plus and we’re pulling 65 plus and two comorbidities. And if I have to work around the clock, with superintendent and with the principals and everything else to get out teachers, I’m going to do that. I’m going to do that. I’m sorry. I’m a little biased. I’m glad that the educators are going to be moved up.

Speaker 19: (32:55)
I think that was a necessity because the fact is, as people get vaccinated, as the weather gets warmer, people seem to, like you said, slack. Don’t slack, wear your mask. The kids are teaching us something right here. You saw them. They were doing it better than we were. So it’s my concern, but yes, I’m so happy that they are. And if we can do it on weekends for them, fine. If you want to bring them here, I’ll do them. I don’t care. Stage four. I’ll put up a tent. I need my teachers vaccinated. I need to protect my citizens. And I’m a little biased because I’m in Gloucester, so yes.

Speaker 16: (33:27)
Thanks everybody.

Speaker 19: (33:27)
Well, it’s the truth.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker Press Conference Transcript March 3

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