Governors scramble to speed vaccine effort after slow start

New York’s governor is threatening to fine hospitals that don’t use their allotment of COVID-19 vaccine fast enough. His South Carolina counterpart says health care workers have until Jan. 15 to get a shot or move to the back of the line. California’s governor wants to use dentists to vaccinate people.

With frustration rising over the slow rollout of the vaccine, state leaders and other politicians around the U.S. are turning up the pressure, improvising and seeking to bend the rules to get shots in arms more quickly.

“Move it quickly. We’re serious,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned hospitals on Tuesday. “If you don’t want to be fined, just don’t participate in the program. It’s not a mandatory program.”

As of Wednesday morning, just 4.8 million people in the U.S. had gotten their first shot out of 17 million doses distributed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While that is believed to an undercount because of a lag in reporting, health officials are still well behind where they wanted to be.

Meanwhile, the U.S. death toll has climbed past 357,000. COVID-19 deaths set another one-day record at 3,775 on Tuesday, though authorities have cautioned that the numbers around holidays can fluctuate dramatically because some health agencies fall behind in reporting cases, then rush to catch up.

Health care workers and nursing home residents are being given priority for the most part in the U.S., but some places are beginning to move on to the next stage, involving the elderly.

The slow rollout has been blamed on a multitude of problems, including a lack of funding and guidance from Washington, mismatches between supply and demand, a patchwork of approaches by state and local governments, distrust of the vaccine, and disarray...