‘I’ll go right now, please’: McHenry County residents frustrated with lack of vaccine availability, lack of communication

Lisa Keiser of Hebron just wants to know when she can get the COVID-19 vaccination.

An essential worker in a grocery store, Keiser is just a few years shy of the 65 and older age group that is at the top of the list for when Phase 1b starts in McHenry County.

Keiser isn’t alone in her frustration.

The Northwest Herald heard from residents across northern Illinois who are eager to get the vaccine many of whom said their frustrations with the rollout of the vaccine stemmed from confusing or missing information about the process and its timeline. Some said it feels like their need to protect themselves and their loved ones is being ignored.

“They should tell us when we can really expect to get the shot,” Keiser said. “If I’m not going to get the shot soon, then they should at least tell me. But they tell me that I can get it, put your name in the list to go nowhere.”

“When is it? I want to go,” Keiser said. “I’ll go right now, please.”

The McHenry County Department of Health is working to make the move into vaccinating Phase 1b populations as smooth as possible and is looking to up their communication efforts to keep residents in the loop, Public Health Nursing Director Susan Karras said in an interview in mid-January.

“We’re doing the best we can to meet everybody’s needs and to get this vaccine out as quickly as possible,” Karras said. “We are totally dedicated to making it happen in the most efficient way so that everybody has an opportunity to get the vaccine, but there are some challenges and some barriers and we just ask for everybody’s cooperation and patience.”

The department is striving to be responsive to calls it receives, but the best thing to do is to look for information on its COVID-19 vaccine page, its Facebook page and news releases it issues to local newspapers like the Northwest Herald.

An update Friday said the health department plans to expand Phase 1b vaccinations in the third or fourth week of February – depending on vaccine availability – to include McHenry County teachers. Local teachers will be vaccinated through clinics run out of Huntley High School and Woodstock North High School in a partnership between school districts, volunteers and the health department.

Further questions should be directed to the health department’s main email address at Health@McHenryCountyIL.gov. A call center for residents who do not have access to the internet is in the works.

Keiser said she places much of the blame at the state and federal level, acknowledging that many of the variables around vaccine distribution lie beyond the McHenry County Department of Health’s control, but she, and many others, still turn to local health officials as they are the only ears within reach.

The “lack of information” or “lack of communication” from state and local health departments made some residents worry about the efficiency and organization behind the rollout, according to responses to a survey conducted by the Northwest Herald.

Alice McCoy, a resident of Algonquin, said the county’s vaccine rollout was “too slow” and “not organized enough.”

Her husband John McCoy, who is 80 and has problems with his lungs, was able to schedule an appointment to get his first dose of the vaccine through Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital, which has already begun vaccinating patients as it is based out of Lake County.

This is one of the health department’s main challenges in dispelling misinformation, Karras said.

Each county has received different allotments of vaccine doses at different times and comparison across county lines will only breed confusion, she said.

McHenry County received its first doses of the vaccine slightly later than other collar counties, which were prioritized in the state’s first allocation based on having reported higher death rates from the virus per capita.

This, compounded by the fact that only a limited amount of vaccines are available to be distributed in the first place, will be the health department’s biggest challenge as they move into vaccinating the much larger Phase 1b population, which contains about 75,000 residents compared with the 6,700 people vaccinated in Phase 1a, Karras said in a McHenry County Board of Health meeting on Monday, Jan. 25.

However, the health department received a large shipment of doses on Jan. 22 and 25 in preparation for the rollout of Phase 1b, Karras said at the meeting. Of the total doses the county has received thus far, 45% came in these two latest shipments.

McCoy, of Algonquin, has registered through McHenry County’s online vaccine enrollment form and said last week that she feels “more calm” knowing there will be movement soon.

Phase 1b, which includes essential workers and residents 65 and older, is set to begin in McHenry County this week. The health department has said that local hospitals and pharmacies will start with people 65 and older while the health department’s clinics finish providing the second doses to Phase 1a populations.

This means Keiser and her husband, both essential workers, likely will have to wait at least a few more weeks.

As an employee of Walmart, Keiser said she feels she should be able to get the vaccine sooner because she has had to expose herself to the virus for about a year now in order to do her job.

“When everybody got to stay home, … when I had heard, after Thanksgiving, they were saying on the news ‘Do not go to the store,’ but I don’t have a choice,” Keiser said. “I had to put my family’s lives in jeopardy to make a living while other people made more money staying home from work.”

Keiser and her husband are in their late 50s and both have preexisting conditions that could make them more susceptible to complications from a coronavirus infection. While she said she understands an order to the process has to exist, Keiser said she feels like people like her do not fit neatly within the distribution phases outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Lisa Bergeron, a resident of DeKalb County, who chose to enlist the help of a home health care service in caring for her elderly father rather than put him in a nursing home during a pandemic.

Bergeron said her father was not eligible to be vaccinated with nursing home residents in Phase 1a even though she feels he is in just as vulnerable of a condition and the family has experienced multiple scares when their home health aids have contracted COVID-19.

Dan Carlson of Geneva also said that, at 64-years-old, he feels it is not right that he be lumped in with everyone older than the age of 16, who will be vaccinated further down the line.

Ultimately, there is not much the health department can do to address frustrations with the pace of the vaccine rollout or the vaccine phases, Karras said, adding that she was speaking only for McHenry County.

The department is trying to be transparent throughout the process and will continue to coordinate with local hospitals, pharmacies and schools to make more clinics available, according to comments made during last week’s meeting.

Rosemary Sanders, a resident of Algonquin, said she feels frustrated occasionally and has a few questions she would like answered, but is reserving her judgement as the McHenry County health department gets into the swing of things. This does not mean that she isn’t eager to be vaccinated.

“We are ready to receive the vaccine so we can be with our family, especially our 11 grandchildren and 1-year-old great-granddaughter again,” she said. “This past year has been very hard, but we’ve tried our best to follow the rules, wear a mask and social distance. I hope this vaccine proves to be the reward.”