TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas is working through the details of exactly who will be eligible for coronavirus vaccines in exactly what order as it concentrates on giving shots mostly to health care workers this month.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly told leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature this week that the vaccines have gone mostly to health care workers, though that group also includes employees in state prisons. She said vaccines could go “almost exclusively” to health care workers into mid-January but also suggested some doses already have reached nursing homes.
Kelly told The Topeka Capital-Journal in an interview that prison inmates are to get vaccinated before the general public because they're in “congregate” housing, but the state doesn't expect vaccines to be available for some adults for at least several months.
The state's vaccine plan made health care workers and nursing home workers and residents the the first in line, followed by other “essential” workers and people 75 or older, particularly those at high risk of coronavirus complications. But Kelly said in an Associated Press interview that the state is considering vaccinations for some officials to preserve “continuity of operations.”
“We expect that sometime right after the first of the year, we will have a more definitive list of who will be vaccinated when,” Kelly told legislative leaders during a meeting Wednesday.
Kansas has reported nearly 210,000 confirmed and probable coronavirus cases since the pandemic began in early March through Wednesday, or one for every 14 of its 2.9 million residents. It has reported more than 2,500 deaths, or one for every 1,162 residents.
Kelly’s staff has repeatedly said that she will get vaccinated — in public — when it’s “her turn.” However her husband, a retired...
