Officials in West Palm Beach are reporting that the reason they have not been vaccinating residents against the Coronavirus is because they have not received the vaccine despite repeatedly asking for it.

Assistant Fire Chief Emergency Manager Brent Bloomfield spoke Tuesday afternoon during a Commission meeting saying:

“The state is receiving vaccines from FEMA,” said Bloomfield. “They, in turn, send them down to the county Department of Health. The Department of Health then decides, in conjunction with Palm Beach County Emergency Management, to whom and where the vaccines go. We ask continuously, almost daily, for vaccines. The response that we are getting now is ‘We really don’t have any.'”

In addition to that, Bloomfield  laid out the many ways that they have asked for and gotten ready to receive the vaccine.

” The City of West Palm Beach set its PODS in motion back in October,” said Bloomfield. ” We designed them and put an incident action plan together. We are ready to go. It is just a matter of getting those vaccines. We are petitioning Dr. Alonso Director of the DOH Palm Beach County, for vaccines to be administered through closed and open PODS.”

Once authorities in West Palm Beach receive the vaccine, they say they plan to work with non-profits, faith-based leaders, neighborhoods, condo/homeowners association leaders and the West Palm Beach Fire Department  among others to get the vaccination out to residents 65-years or older.

” I have let Palm Beach County and the Department of Health know that our fire department is ready, willing, and able to administer the vaccine if and when we get the doses,” Mayor Keith James said. ” We are pushing whatever leverage we have as a city to see if we can get some more doses.