re: More than 12 million vaccine doses sent to states

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Med students do not have 12 hours a day to dedicate to giving shots and they gain basically nothing from the “educational experience”.

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No, but why wouldn't a local college look to do some "goodwill" and offer discounts on their classes if the med students donate 40 hours or so to help with the virus?

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Yes. Not just for them, but also for hospitals. Who will cover the incoming interns’ shifts for the month that has been pushed back? Creating a problem to fix a problem is an awful thing to do.

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I didn’t know hospitals were that dependent on fresh grads. I guess I would have thought that the prospect of no longer being overwhelmed with Covid patients would hold some offsetting value.

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Hospitals would be down innumerable workers for the entire month of July.

You create another problem while trying to fix one.

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Agreed it exchanges one problem for another, and by the time you sort through all of the possible ideas it would probably get kicked out, but exchanging a major problem for a less-major problem is still a win in this game. And, the other premise prevailing in this thread is we knew this was coming and had time to debate every possible idea to the Nth degree and hit the ground running.

From the outside looking in, the "down innumberable workers" seems like an example of an administrative hurdle.

Back of the envelope: If a medical professional works 30 years, than about 3.3% of them need to be replaced annually by incoming medical professionals. So in the case where we say every med student in their last year of study was to defer graduation by 1 month, there is a potential to be down 3.3% of staff during July 2021.

Questions,

1) Is the demand for medical services in July greater than or less than 95% or so of peak? (if so, can some shifts be moved around to ride it out).
2) Is industry stability such that it is dependent on the most junior personnel available, be available on July 1st?
3) What would be the cost/benefit of say, getting those medical professionals due to retire Jan 1st through July 31st to extend to August? (Recovering about half the supply).

I'm with Scruffy in that doing steps like this just to arbitrarily save lives isn't worth it. I also agree that we shouldn't be waiting on wide spread vaccinations to open up.

I'm really working with the fact that we've been placed into a state of war with the virus by the government, but the action to get us out of said war (get vaccines out to every one that wants them), are not of the nature we would see in a war.

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The vast majority of hospitals are under filled, resulting in cuts to staff and services.

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So....have your hospitals proposed using that staff to vaccinate people?

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The barriers in such a rollout are minor

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They genuinely seem minor to me. Per Scruffy there are also a gaggle of unemployed medical professionals at the moment. I inclined to agree with that.

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Have Chick-Fil-A give the vaccine.

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You know, you say that in jest, but think about how many people one nurse with a box full of loaded syringes could vaccinate right through car windows from 11 to 2 every day. Record keeping would be the sticking point and because each location has its regulars, you'd probably hit a point pretty quickly where the line is full of people you've already jabbed or have refused. Hitting places like that at the outset which have high throughput and already have the infrastructure for queueing that people know how to use is just the kind of outside the box thinking that I like. All the nurse has to do is keep track of paperwork and move down the line to reach way more people than if the nurse were set up in a room in a clinic somewhere waiting for people to come to her.

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I didn’t know hospitals were that dependent on fresh grads.

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We're not talking about the staff at your average hometown hospital here. We're talking about the larger hospitals that bring in fresh grads to train under the supervision of very experienced attending physicians while treating patients. Doctors graduate from med school in May/June and need somewhere to go to do their residency to complete the next step of their training. Don't forget that you don't just start doing your thing after medical school. There's three years of residency, then at least one more year fellowship/specialty training. So, that's a minimum of four years post medical school that the system has to smoothly integrate with the graduation window of baby docs.

Since med schools graduate in May/June, everything else regarding further training is pretty much keyed to that timeframe. Contracts are written to end about then. Senior residents that have completed their training at the teaching hospital and wish to move on for specialized training, fellowships, etc. all leave on that schedule as well.

You can't just take one part of the training progression and move those people away from that May/June turnover window without completely fricking up the entire system, with effects possibly rippling through the system for four or more years.