MINNESOTA — The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) is allowing hospitals, health care systems and other vaccination partners to start vaccinating a “broader category of Minnesotans” against the COVID-19 virus where possible, but Brown County is still working on vaccinating frontline health care workers.

Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said in a statement that the move is intended to free providers to use all available doses as quickly as possible while still ensuring that doses are targeted to those most in need of the vaccine.

The state’s priority has been to vaccinate the frontline healthcare workers, but some health care providers have extra vaccines that can be used for the next priority group.

“We are approaching the end of our earliest stages of the vaccine rollout, and we want to make sure all vaccines in the state are getting into arms as quickly as possible,” Malcolm said in a news release. “The state is making sure that providers have nothing holding them back from immediately using any vaccine they have available.”

She said more Minnesotans want the vaccine than there are doses currently available. The state is urging the federal government to provide more vaccine immediately.

Brown County is still working to vaccinate priority groups. Public Health Director Karen Moritz said public health is still working on vaccinating the frontline health care workers. The hope is to completely vaccinate the priority group by the end of January before expanding the vaccine rollout.

Moritz said she believed the MDH move to expand the use of the vaccine is for counties that have a surplus vaccine.

“This vaccine rollout will vary across the state,” Moritz said. “It does depend on how many people in the 1A priority group are in these counties.”

Brown County has a relatively high number of people in the 1a priority group with the Medical Center and multiple longterm living facilities and the county is hoping to complete these vaccinations first. Moritz said public health does want to vaccinate more groups of people when it is possible.

“We are very excited to vaccinate more people,” Moritz said. “When we have enough to vaccinate more people we will make it known.”

The AP contributed to this story.