New Jersey will open six vaccine “mega-sites” in January, in the service of state efforts to vaccinate 70 percent of its population within six months, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Friday.
The sites will be distributed statewide and will be in place to help ongoing efforts to vaccinate front-line health workers early in the new year.
New Jersey Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli said Friday that the state’s efforts to quickly vaccinate some 4.7 million Garden State residents will depend on the availability of vaccines.
“We expect demand to exceed supply,” he said.
Persichilli said the federal government’s dose supply was already below expectations.
“Pfizer’s second pre-dose stretch for next week was expected to be 86,775,” he said. “Now, based on what has been introduced on the federal platform ‘Tiberius,’ we see that we only expect 53,625. That is a 38% reduction.”
Persichilli added that the total doses scheduled to be delivered to New Jersey in December had been revised downward by 33%, according to the federal database.
Murphy said he had not yet obtained a satisfactory reason why New Jersey, along with all other states, planned to get fewer doses of the Covid-19 vaccine than initially expected.
“I talked to Pfizer,” he said. “They have no idea why this is being done.”
“Pfizer told me, personally,‘ we want him to know that this is not us, ’” Murphy said, adding that he will present the issue in a call to the White House this weekend.
New Jersey reported an additional 3,975 infections on Friday, along with 44 deaths. Hospitalizations were down for the second day in a row, with at least 3,582 patients hospitalized with confirmed or suspected Covid-19 as of Thursday night.
“These figures have begun to move in the right direction, which is downward,” Murphy said before adding, “two days certainly don’t set a trend.”
Note: These numbers were published by the New Jersey Public Health Agency and may not exactly match in real time the CNN database extracted from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.