US: Vaccine rollout skips TSA screeners, air-traffic controllers

They’re essential workers performing critical safety work and have been assigned priority designation to receive the coronavirus vaccine. Yet tens of thousands of airport security screeners, air-traffic controllers and federal accident investigators who must report to work in spite of the virus ravaging the US haven’t gotten the shot and aren’t sure how and when they will. “It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Jennifer Homendy, one of five members of the NTSB. “The vaccine rollout from my point of view has been mismanaged.” The problem, according to multiple officials, is that the shots are being delivered by scores of state and local health agencies, which are using varying standards for who should be given priority. In some cases, employees have been told they qualify for the vaccine, only to be directed back to their employer after saying they work for the federal government, Homendy said. Nowhere has the impact been more severe than among the roughly 50,000 TSA Transportation Screening Officers. So far in the pandemic, more than 6,100 TSA employees, most of them airport screeners, have contracted coronavirus and 14 have died, according to TSA.<br/>