The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) COVID-19 vaccination initiative quickly identified employees in vaccination priority groups, but provided little guidance on components, says a new report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG).
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a pandemic due to the rapid spread and severity of the disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has partnered with other Federal agencies to develop and implement a national immunization program. It set out recommendations for identifying population groups for initial vaccination distribution in COVID-19. Recommendations include placing health care personnel in priority group 1a on immunization, and placing non -health care, frontline, key workers, such as those in law enforcement and national security duties, in priority group 1b.
DHS headquarters and some of its components employ first responder health care personnel and key frontline workers, including those responsible for law enforcement and national security missions. For example, the United States Coast Guard Office of Health Services and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Health Service Corps employ health care personnel such as nurses and doctors, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the United States Secret Service uses essential frontlines. employees in the field of law enforcement such as Border Patrol agents and special agents.
Through Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first vaccine for COVID-19 on December 11, 2020. Prior to the EUA, DHS anticipated the need to coordinate vaccinations for some employees. . To prepare for vaccination of these employees against COVID-19, DHS has asked its components to use CDC recommendations to determine which employees will be placed in priority groups 1a and 1b. DHS did not directly receive a vaccine inventory allocation for its employees. DHS has partnered with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), which has an established health care infrastructure, to make the vaccine available to DHS personnel in priority groups 1a and 1b.
The OIG found that DHS acted quickly to identify employees in vaccination priority groups, but did not rely on its current policies and provided little guidance on the components, resulting in unequal responses across the Department if which types of employees are deemed eligible. DHS expects the components to use their discretion to determine employee eligibility because they better understand their unique missions and needs. As a result, responses varied in terms of which series of work were considered eligible for placement in the priority groups. During its review, the OIG heard from a staff of the vaccination initiative that said too many employees were in priority groups and noted that this was because no one at DHS wanted to refuse to include employees.
According to the OIG, DHS has only partially focused on staff resources and has delayed the establishment of a comprehensive, full-time task force to manage the effort. Between October and December 2020, DHS employee vaccination efforts will primarily rely on DHS headquarters and employees of the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. Realizing the need to expedite the vaccination program, DHS urged FEMA to recruit and activate a full-time team to ensure the success of subsequent vaccination efforts. On January 25, 2021, former Acting DHS Secretary, David Pekoske, introduced a new vaccination task force, Operation Vaccinate Our Workforce (VOW). Operation VOW personnel told OIG that the vaccine initiative was a dynamic situation, with one stating that it “seems to have no plan” and saying that “DHS was flying the plane and built it at the same time.” While the pandemic is clearly a dynamic situation, the OIG said DHS could avoid future delays by developing emergency response protocols including guidelines for establishing and placing personnel in teams. of responding to the incident.
The watchdog also noted in its report that DHS’s communications with its employees were inconsistent or unclear, causing confusion among some employees. The OIG found that DHS emails and videos contained misleading statements about which employees would receive vaccinations.
An example that highlights confusing communication is an email thread in February 2021 between a representative of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and a point of contact with Veterans Affairs (VA) describing the TSA’s uncertainty about an upcoming vaccination event. DHS provided the date, time, and instructions for an upcoming vaccination event at a local VA facility, but to only a subset of qualified TSA employees in that area. A TSA representative discovered the mistake, realizing some eligible employees had not received notice. The TSA representative asked the VA point of contact who said he had received it before and answered many questions about the same issue. The TSA representative confirmed that the VA location representative actually contacted each name on the list provided to the VA by DHS but did not specify why DHS did not notify certain eligible employees about the event.
The OIG acknowledged that some communication hiccups can be expected in such a dynamic situation, but said DHS should consider allocating the resources necessary to ensure consistent, accurate communication with employees and partners in the future.
Qualified OIG employees said they had trouble registering and scheduling vaccination appointments through the SystemNow system. In many instances, users informed staff of problems such as no link or broken link to access the site for opting in to receive the vaccine. Of the 166,145 employees in priority groups 1a and 1b, 96,367 (58 percent) opted in to ServiceNow to receive the vaccine.
Operation VOW set a goal to facilitate the first dose of the vaccine for 80 percent of opt-in, qualified employees by May 1, 2021, but only about 29 percent reported receiving the first dose. at a VA medical center on that date. The OIG said the challenges in gathering employee data and achieving data accuracy once they get the information are complex DHS’s vaccination efforts. After assigning components to gather data to inform the total number of vaccines needed for VHA to be given to qualified DHS employees, it was determined on several occasions that the components sent data with missing or incorrect information, resulting in scheduling delays in ServiceNow. Operation VOW personnel described the data provided by the components as full of errors such as missing information and incorrect email addresses. A TSA employee described manually researching more than 600 missing email addresses to ensure TSA submits data as complete and accurate as possible. The OIG said it is unlikely that other components will take the same steps as the TSA to ensure personnel data is complete and accurate. The supervisor wants DHS to consider, design, and implement a procedure for conducting employee data management.
The OIG report also includes a recommendation for DHS to assign, direct, and supervise division representatives to maintain lists of key employees. DHS said it currently has a policy in place that meets the purpose of the recommendation and the DHS Chief Human Capital Officer will consider whether additional guidance is needed based on further review of the findings in the OIG report.
Read the full OIG report