U.S. emergency medical personnel are getting quick access to COVID-19 vaccines in some parts of the United States while fire chiefs in other areas forecast a delay of weeks or months, highlighting the chaotic nature of a rollout that relies on states and counties to plan and administer distribution.
A lack of detailed federal guidelines has forced U.S. states and counties to create their own plans for distributing initially limited doses of COVID-19 vaccines in hopes of curbing a raging pandemic that has killed more than 332,000 Americans.
All states have prioritized nursing homes and frontline healthcare workers, following federal guidelines. But the federal plan does not define frontline health workers, and local decisions sometimes differ on whether the United State's roughly 430,000 emergency medical technicians, or EMTs, are included.