The answer was surprising, in that that official — Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Nirav Shah — and the state’s largest hospital network and operator of the southern Maine vaccine site — have completely contradictory ones. Maine CDC says they continue to give large allocations of vaccine to the Bangor site while those in other parts of the state have huge waiting lists because the other sites don’t have the capacity to take more. Not so, says MaineHealth, which says they have latent capacity and been begging for bigger supplies for some time, which Maine CDC isn’t giving them.
As you’ll see in the story, Shah intimates that MaineHealth hasn’t demonstrated an ability to take more, likely an allusion to a scandal involving the vaccination of indelible workers.
For wider context on where Maine stands with the pandemic, consider this “step back and assess” feature I wrote on the last five and half months of the crisis.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.