SCRANTON, Pa. — It was a chance to ask pressing questions about the COVID-19 vaccine directly to health officials.
Plenty of questions were sent in, but only a handful were answered before the town hall ended.
One of the big ones: Why have some school districts started vaccinating their teachers ahead of their turn in Pennsylvania's tiered schedule?
Abington Heights was one such district; the superintendent tells Newswatch 16 a local pharmacy reached out to him to coordinate a vaccination clinic for teachers.
The Department of Health acknowledged there is not yet a timeline for when all teachers will get their vaccine, but said some may have gotten one early to prevent a dose from going to waste.
"The bottom line is we want people to be vaccinated, so rather than risk any wastage of a dose, we want that vaccine used," said Department of Health Deputy Secretary Cindy Findlay.
Geisinger CEO Dr. Jaewon Ryu confirmed this had been happening.
"If you rewind the tape to last week before the expansion of the 1A category, we, like many other health systems, we had excess capacity, and of course, you don't want to waste that capacity. You don't want to waste the vaccine, and so we had been working with some groups within that 1B to scramble for those unexpected and unpredictable kind of available capacity," Dr. Ryu explained.
But this week it's the opposite problem.
Hospitals like Geisinger are racing to keep up with demand after the state expanded eligibility in the first phase.
"Why would we expand the phases when we're already limited in what we can give? So when we expand phases, that makes our demand go up while our supply is down and our constituents go crazy because they want it and they can't have it," said State Rep. Marty Flynn, (D) 113th District.
The answer from the Department of Health was that it's following recommendations from the federal government.
During the virtual town hall, one person who is supposed to be eligible for the vaccine now wrote that they were told by every provider to not even bother calling back to schedule an appointment until March.
"That is a little concerning," said PEMA Director Randy Padfield. "They should have access to it at some point in time sooner than March at this point.
"I would just ask for your patience. All along, we've been advised that this won't be quick," said Department of Health Deputy Secretary Cindy Findlay.
Health officials say they've been told by the federal government the number of vaccine doses Pennsylvania receives each week will not go down, but it likely won't go up for a while.
And that's why things like mass vaccination clinics are not going to happen just yet.
"If we use that tool now, the challenge we would run into is we potentially can overrun on the front end initial shots and not have enough on the back end for people to actually have their second dose, and that's a serious concern," said Padfield.