NEW YORK (Reuters) – Vaccine shortages of COVID-19 persisted on Saturday under growing pressure as previously inoculated Americans returned for second mandatory prey and millions of eligible people had just be with the first.
Shortages of supply, which will occur as the U.S. vaccination effort enters its second month, caused some health care systems to suspend appointments for first-time vaccine applicants and a health care system. of New York canceled a number of existing ones.
“As eligibility increases, you only increase demand, but we can’t increase supply,” Northwell Health spokesman Joe Kemp told Reuters by phone.
Northwell, New York’s largest health care provider, offers appointments only as more are vaccinated and only after allocating doses to people scheduled for their second shots, Kemp said.
Although the supply flow has been sporadic, Northwell expects to offer appointments next week, he added.
The two approved vaccines, one from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech and the other from Moderna Inc., require reinforcement three to four weeks after the first shot to maximize their effectiveness against the coronavirus.
While health care workers, residents, and nursing home staff have top priority, eligibility for vaccines has since expanded as some states open it to healthy people in nursing homes. 65 years or older and people of any age with pre-existing conditions.
In addition to New York, signs of vaccine supply strains appeared in Vermont, Michigan, South Carolina, New Jersey and Oregon.
In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown said vaccinations for seniors and educators would be delayed, while Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said the state will focus exclusively on its population over the age of 75. due to “unpredictable” federal supplies.
NOT “PROMISING ABOUT”
“Instead of over-promising a limited supply to a large population that we know we can’t vaccinate at the same time, we believe our strategy will get arms shots faster and more efficient, with fewer casualties,” Scott said on Twitter.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last week that looser requirements would make 7 million of New York’s 19 million residents eligible for inoculations.
New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital said Friday it canceled vaccination appointments until Tuesday because of “abrupt changes in vaccine supply.”
An NYU Langone Health official, another health giant, said he has indefinitely suspended new appointments because he had not received any confirmation that he would get more vaccine.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that while the city was increasing its vaccination capacity, supplies still reached 100,000 doses a week “very insignificantly,” which put it at march to dry next week.
De Blasio was among three dozen mayors of major cities who asked the new Biden administration last week to send them shipments of COVID-19 vaccines directly, ignoring state governments.
State spokesman Jack Sterne blamed the supply problems on the federal government, which said it reduced New York’s vaccine delivery next week by 50,000 doses to 250,000.
“The problem has been Washington’s lack of allocation, and now that we have expanded the eligible population, the federal government remains unsatisfied with demand,” Sterne said in an email.
The intergovernmental tension was joined by a dispute in which several governors accused the Trump administration on Friday of deceptively pledging to distribute millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine from a stock that the U.S. health secretary has acknowledged does not exist. .
Since the first vaccine was administered in the United States in mid-December, nearly 12.3 million doses, of which 31.2 million have been distributed, have been given, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total includes 1.6 million people who have received both doses, according to the CDC.
Since the start of the pandemic, 23.4 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, 392,153 of whom have died, according to a Reuters account.
While seriously ill patients are straining health care systems in some parts of the country, especially in California, the national hospitalization rate has dropped in the past two weeks to 127,095 on Friday.
A model widely cited by the University of Washington projects that January will be the deadliest month of the pandemic, with more than 100,000 lives.
But the recently revised model from the university’s Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment projects that the monthly toll will drop later, dropping to about 11,000 in April, as more people are vaccinated.
“On May 1, some states may be close to herd immunity,” the IHME said.
Report by Peter Szekely; Edited by Dan Grebler