Holy Name Medical Center CEO Michael Maron told CNBC on Tuesday that vaccination efforts against Covid at his New Jersey hospital have been hampered by a consistent problem: inconsistent availability.
“The biggest challenge we have right now is supplying the vaccine. We just can’t get it and we can’t get it in any reliable way. It’s very difficult,” Maron told Power Lunch.
“One week we will have Pfizer, the next week we will have Modern,” he added, referring to the manufacturers of the two vaccines that have received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “We never know exactly how long it will take, whether it’s a thousand doses … or two thousand or more.”
So far, Maron said Holy Name Medical Center, located in Teaneck, near New York City, has administered about 5,000 doses of vaccine. However, Maron said the hospital has the capacity to administer 3,000 daily doses, in part because of a partnership it established with Teaneck to create a vaccination site at a community center.
On Monday, 570 residents received the vaccine at the site, according to a post on Teaneck’s official website. But due to the “lack of available vaccine,” town manager Dean Kazinci wrote, the site is closed on Tuesday, illustrating the supply challenges Maron was talking about.
“Holy Name Medical Center is pending delivery of additional vaccine trays that should arrive by mid-week. We will release additional information when it becomes available,” Kazinci wrote.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Holy Name website also informs visitors that the hospital is not scheduling vaccination appointments against Covid “at present” due to availability limitations.
The deployment of Covid vaccines in the U.S. has progressed at a slower pace than officials expected. As of Friday, about 12.3 million doses have been administered, according to the latest available data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 31.2 million doses have been distributed.
President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on Wednesday, has vowed to speed up the deployment of the vaccine with a commitment to administer 100 million doses in 100 days. On Sunday, Biden’s choice to lead the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said she believed the U.S. would have an adequate supply of vaccines to achieve the goal.
“It will be a strong lift, but we have enough to do it,” Walensky told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Covid hospitalizations
While vaccines against Covid are critical to limiting the impact of the disease, Maron warned that the outbreak of the American coronavirus is a current threat. On Tuesday, the country’s death toll from Covid eclipsed 400,000, just over a month after registering 300,000, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.
Maron said Covid’s hospitalizations at Holy Name Medical Center were not at levels previously seen in the pandemic, as in March and April. The hospital also has better treatments for patients now, he said. However, he said a worrying aspect has been the age of the patients hospitalized with the disease.
“It’s not who you’d think,” Maron said. “It’s mostly people between the ages of 45 and 65, so it’s not the fragile people that everyone was talking about. These are the ones who are on the fans, so we’re a little worried.”
He said it is unclear what is causing hospitalizations among younger U.S. residents. “For us in the industry, we remember that this is still a very, very serious and deadly virus. We don’t have to take it lightly.”