O’FALLON, Mo. (AP) – Several states say they have been told they would expect far fewer doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in its second week of distribution, raising concerns about possible shooting delays for workers of health. long-term care residents.
But senior Trump administration officials downplayed the risk of delays on Thursday, citing confusion over semantics, while Pfizer said its production levels have not changed.
The first doses in the US were administered on Monday and already this week hundreds of thousands of people have been vaccinated, mostly health workers. The pace is expected to pick up next week, taking on Modern obtains federal authorization for your vaccine.
Efforts to help prevent coronavirus occur amid a staggering death toll of more than 300,000 Monday. Johns Hopkins University says approximately 2,400 people die daily in the United States, an average of more than 210,000 cases a day.
In recent days, governors and health leaders from at least a dozen states have said the federal government has told them that the shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine next week will be lower than initially planned.
Little explanation was offered, which left many state officials perplexed.
“This is disturbing and frustrating,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter on Thursday after learning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the state’s funding would be reduced by 40 percent. “We need predictable and accurate numbers to plan and ensure success on the ground.”
California, where an explosion of cases is causing intensive care units to reach the breaking point, will receive 160,000 fewer vaccine doses than state officials had predicted next week, a roughly 40% reduction.
California hospitals began vaccinations this week from Pfizer’s first shipment of 327,000 doses and had expected them to arrive even more next week. Instead, officials have been told they would expect about 233,000 doses, said Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for Governor Gavin Newsom.
Missouri health director Dr. Randall Williams said his condition will get 25% to 30% less of the vaccine next week than expected. A statement from the Iowa Department of Public Health says its allocation will be “reduced by up to 30%, but we are working to obtain confirmation and additional details from our federal partners.”
Michigan shipment will fall by about a quarter. Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Indiana have also been told they expect smaller shipments.
Gov. Brian Kemp said Thursday that Georgia is in line to receive 60,000 doses next week after initially expecting 99,000. Still, the Republican governor has had little praise for the vaccination effort and has not strongly opposed the decrease in the amount.
“I wish it was a lot more, but now it could be zero if you look at the past history of vaccines,” Kemp said.
In Washington, DC, two senior Trump administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning said states will receive full allocations, but misunderstandings about vaccine supply and changes in the delivery schedule can be confusing.
One official said the initial number of available doses provided to states were projections based on manufacturers ’information, not fixed assignments. Some state officials may have misunderstood it, the official said.
The two officials also said the changes the federal government made to the delivery schedule, at the request of the governors, may contribute to a wrong impression that fewer doses arrive. The key change is to space the delivery of weekly state assignments over several days to make distribution more manageable.
“They’ll get their weekly assignment, it just won’t reach them one day,” an official said.
Pfizer made it clear that in terms of production, nothing has changed.
“Pfizer has not had any production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine and any shipment containing the vaccine is pending or delayed,” spokesman Eamonn Nolan said in an email. “We continue to ship our orders to locations specified by the U.S. government.”
The company said in a written statement that this week it “successfully shipped all the 2.9 million doses that the U.S. government ordered us to the locations specified by them. We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse, but , at this time, we have not received any shipping instructions for additional doses.
Senior administration officials said Pfizer’s statement about the doses awaiting shipping instructions, while technically accurate, conveniently omits the explanation: it was planned that way.
Federal officials said Pfizer pledged to provide 6.4 million doses of its vaccine in the first week after approval. But Federal Operation Warp Speed already planned to distribute just 2.9 million of those doses immediately. Another 2.9 million should be kept in the Pfizer warehouse to ensure that people vaccinated in the first week can get their second shot later to make the protection fully effective. Finally, the government maintains an additional 500,000 doses as a reserve against unforeseen problems.
Pfizer said it remains confident it can deliver up to 50 million doses worldwide this year and up to 1.3 billion doses by 2021.
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Alonso-Zaldivar contributed from Washington, DC Rachel La Corte to Olympia, Washington, contributed to this report.