As if it were the climax of a very sweet Christmas film in corona time, the Anglican church in The Hague is buzzing with life on Wednesday evening.
Amidst a decorated tree and a nativity scene, volunteers dressed in blue suits put one booster shot after another. Pizzas are going around in the line, which curls around the church outside. Those who walk outside cheer: they feel safe in front of the class again, dare to visit vulnerable family again or are still allowed to go on winter sports. In the bustling church building, the pastor looks on approvingly.
And yet: this was by no means a completely peaceful Christmas story, say Daisy Pors, Chris Mos and Wouter Dikker, the three general practitioners in The Hague who ensure that 2,600 shots are taken in the church on Wednesday. One moment there is the doctor of the GGD who comes to their aid on his own initiative, the next the agency changes its mind or the ministry causes hassle.
“People were constantly being called back,” says Pors a day later in their practice in the Archipelbuurt of the same name, the diplomatic district in The Hague. “Fortunately, there are people who wanted to swim against the current and helped,” says Mos.
The two doctors are euphoric, but also concerned. A day after their massive injection, the doctors have no idea whether they will be reimbursed for the thousands of euros in costs incurred.
Just do the whole practice
So far, to their own chagrin, GPs have been sidelined in the booster campaign. It is the GGD that receives the vaccines, then distributes them and finally puts them in place. But Saturday, a week ago, Pors sees a hole.
Also read: The doctor, the pastor and a boosterally in Rouveen
It starts with a tip from the Hague GP umbrella. He wrote in an e-mail to all local doctors that it is still possible for them to apply for a few vaccines for non-mobile elderly people. They could then be vaccinated by the GP.
Pors: “I called my regular contact person at the GGD and asked: can I not give the patients I gave AstraZeneca at my practice earlier this year the third shot? Give me two hundred vaccines. Then she said: ‘John, I can vaccinate your entire practice?’ A joke, I thought, but she meant it.”
The whole practice, that’s thousands of people.
“And then we thought…”, says Mos. Pors: “…this is an opening!”
Moss: “We can do this. No matter how busy it is. No matter how much the water is on our lips as general practitioners. We won’t be able to sit down to Christmas dinner knowing you could have done this, and you didn’t. We will get those vaccines pricked.”
All weekend long, GPs prepare to vaccinate as many local residents as possible – and if any vaccine remains, they’ll find a way to squander that stock. While Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Minister Hugo de Jonge announced the latest lockdown in a press conference on Saturday, they are on the line with the pharmacists’ association: it still has a few thousand envelopes left. Handy, because the Primera is closed. They buy all stamps at four supermarkets. On Sunday they gather family and friends to fold letters for hours.
“And then the printer stopped working!” Pors laughs. “Then I thought: let’s do it by e-mail. But that eventually became so many emails that we were marked as spammers and ended up on a blacklist.” Mos: “As if we were a bunch of Russian hackers.”
Don’t play GGD
A day later, the GGD also starts to grumble. Actually, there are not enough people to ‘pull up’, to prepare all the vaccines. And can all vaccinees be registered correctly in this way? On Tuesday in the House of Representatives, Hugo de Jonge announced that it was “not the intention” [is] that GPs are going to play GGD”. Government support is disappearing.
Tuesday night everything looks uncertain. “We heard from colleagues that the GGD in Brabant had canceled all initiatives by general practitioners there,” says Pors. “But we had already arranged everything and incurred at least seven thousand euros in costs.”
The government now says: this was not approved by us, so you don’t get the money
Chris Mos GP in The Hague
Pors and Moss continue. What else should they do? Thanks to their letters and e-mails, most local residents seem to have heard of the injection day. Word of mouth does the rest. The English church appears to be prepared to serve as a puncture site. And if on Wednesday morning, on the injection day, it turns out that the local GGD has too few ‘starters’ because half of them are at home with corona, the general practitioners themselves drum up extra doctors and pharmacists to help.
It works. The entire Archipelbuurt, young and old, will enter the church that Wednesday. Teachers from the schools in the area have received a call from the practice, as have the members of the church community. They show up en masse to help out as volunteers.
Also read this interview with GGD chairman André Rouvoet: ‘What we are going to do now has never been shown’
If the GGD delivers hundreds more vaccines at the end of the afternoon, the general practitioners will post a notification on the website PrullenbakVaccin.nl. From that moment on, there is a line at the door for the rest of the evening, until the last shot has been made. There is clapping. “I’m standing here in a Nativity scene that has come to life,” says an exuberant Moss to the large group of volunteers. “And now I want a drink.”
Yet they are far from done with it, Pors and Mos say afterwards. They have incurred costs: for the envelopes, the paper, the stamps, the ink. Their practice was closed for three days to prepare everything. “But the government now says: this was not approved by us, so you don’t get the money,” says Mos. “We have no idea how we’re going to solve this.”
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