Major U.S. pharmacies are being stretched thin because of the ongoing labor shortage hitting the nation and making it harder to get a coronavirus vaccine.
A Walgreens customer told The Washington Post that their pharmacy closed a half-hour before their scheduled appointment due to service cutbacks. The customer, Dania Palanker, had made the appointment for her 7-year-old daughter and was even given an email confirmation.
Another mother in Colorado told Denver 7 News that Walgreens had canceled vaccine appointments for her two children because of staff shortages.
A Walgreens spokeswoman confirmed to FOX Business that it has adjusted pharmacy hours in a limited number of stores to accommodate current staffing needs. The chain apologized for any inconvenience customers may experience when scheduling appointments, and said it would work with patients to reschedule any impacted vaccine appointments at these stores as soon as possible. The digital scheduler is improving to better support store hours. Demand for COVID-19 vaccines picked up over the summer as the delta variant spread rapidly, according to pharmacists. Since then eligibility expanded to include children, which stoked demand. With the new Omicron variant, federal health officials are now urging everyone at least 18 years old to get a booster shot.
A CVS spokeswoman told FOX Business that the pharmacy teams in the pharmacy are flexible in meeting patients needs in a dynamic environment that is part of a nationwide workforce shortage that affects nearly every industry and company. The chain said it hired 10,000 pharmacy technicians to support COVID 19 activities early on in the epidemic.
CVS has hired 23,000 new retail employees and is about to hire another 20,000 more people, according to the latest nationwide hiring event. The company even raised its minimum hourly wage to $15 an hour in August, with even higher starting hourly rates for certain roles effective July 2022, the spokesperson said.