Governor Larry Hogan will be utilizing volunteers and the National Guard to get vaccines distributed more quickly.

Governor Larry Hogan has announced a new strategy for getting COVID vaccines into the arms of residents across Maryland. In a press conference from the Annapolis Statehouse on January 5, Hogan detailed a series of actions designed to speed up the pace of vaccines, including activating the National Guard, enhancing reporting, and adding more resources for hospitals and clinics. Phase 1B of the state’s vaccination schedule will also be modified to include teachers, school, and child-care workers.

The roll-out of the COVID vaccines has been slow across Maryland and the country, drawing the ire of citizens eager to get vaccinated. Governor Hogan says 98 percent of the doses sent to Maryland have been delivered to vaccination sites. To help get those vaccinations delivered faster, National Guard support teams and more than 700 volunteers will be helping clinics at the direction of local health officers.

The state will require clinics to report vaccine administrations to a central network within 24 hours and may reduce future allocations to clinics that do not give out 75 percent of vaccines in a timely manner. Vaccinations will be conducted in a “rolling allocation” model, meaning the state will move to the next group even if all people in a phase have not yet been vaccinated.

The state is currently in phase 1A of vaccination distribution that includes first responders, residents and nursing home staff, healthcare workers, and corrections and public safety officers. Governor Hogan said he will also be adding those working in education to the next phase of the vaccination schedule.

Courtesy of Governor Larry Hogan's office

• Phase 1B: Residents over age 75, high-risk inmates, special needs group homes and developmentally disabled people, select government employees and teachers, child care, and education staff. Phase 1B is scheduled to begin in late January.
• Phase 1C: Residents aged 65 to 74, frontline employees such as grocery workers, transit workers, farmworkers, and manufacturing workers.
• Phase 2: Residents aged 16-64 with pre-existing conditions and other essential workers.
• Phase 3: General population

The governor also gave a step-by-step description of how vaccines are allocated and delivered to states by the federal government.

“While the initial distribution of vaccines does offer a glimmer of hope, we still have a long way to go in this fight,” said Governor Hogan. “Distributing and administering vaccines throughout 2021 will be without question the greatest peacetime undertaking in American history, and will be a massive, all-hands-on-deck, ongoing operation between the federal, state, and local governments and the private sector. I want to assure the people of Maryland that we are going to leverage every resource to get more shots into more arms as quickly as we possibly can, in a safe and orderly way.”

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