O’FALLON, Mo. (AP) – Several states say they have been told to expect far fewer doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in the second week of distribution, raising concerns about potential delays in admissions for health professionals and long-term residents.
But senior Trump administration officials on Thursday downplayed the risk of delays, citing confusion over semantics, while Pfizer said production levels have not changed.
The first US doses were administered on Monday and already this week hundreds of thousands of people, mostly health workers, have been vaccinated. The pace is expected to pick up next week, assuming Moderna gets federal approval for his vaccine.
Attempts to fend off the coronavirus come amid a staggering death toll of more than 300,000 on Monday. Johns Hopkins University says that about 2,400 people die in the US every day, which equates to an average of more than 210,000 cases per day.
In recent days, governors and health leaders in at least a dozen states have said the federal government has told them that next week’s shipping of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be less than originally planned.
Little explanation was given, leaving many government officials perplexed.
“This is disruptive and frustrating,” Washington administration Democrat Jay Inslee wrote on Twitter on Thursday after learning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the state’s allocation would be reduced by 40%. “We need accurate, predictable numbers to plan and ensure real-world success.”
California, where an explosion in cases puts intensive care units to breaking point, will receive 160,000 less vaccine doses next week than government officials expected – a reduction of about 40%.
Hospitals in California began vaccinations this week from Pfizer’s first shipment of 327,000 doses and expected more to arrive next week. Instead, officials have been told to expect about 233,000 doses, said Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for Governor Gavin Newsom.
Missouri health director Dr. Randall Williams, said his state will get 25% to 30% less of the vaccine than expected next week. A statement from the Iowa Department of Public Health said the allocation will be “reduced by as much as 30%, but we are working to get confirmation and additional details from our federal partners.”
Shipment from Michigan will take about a quarter. Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Indiana would also expect smaller shipments.
Gov. Brian Kemp said on 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 but praise for the vaccination effort and didn’t really object to the reduced amount.
“I wish it were a lot more, but it could be zero now if you look at the 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 their full allocations, but misunderstandings about vaccine supplies and changes to the delivery schedule can create confusion. to care.
An official said the first numbers of available doses provided to states were projections based on information from the manufacturers, not fixed allocations. Some state officials may have misunderstood that, the official said.
The two officials also said that changes the federal government has made to the delivery schedule, at the request of governors, may add to the false impression that fewer doses are coming. The most significant change involves spreading the delivery of states’ weekly allocations over several days to make distribution more manageable.
“They’re going to get their weekly assignment, it just won’t get them in one day,” said an official.
Pfizer made it clear that nothing has changed in terms of production.
“Pfizer has had no manufacturing problems with our COVID-19 vaccine, and no shipments of the vaccine have been suspended or delayed,” spokesman Eamonn Nolan said in an email. “We will continue to ship our orders to the locations specified by the US government.”
The company said in a written statement that it “successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses requested from us by the US government to the locations they specified. We still have millions of doses in our warehouse, but so far we have not received shipping instructions for additional doses. “
The senior government officials said Pfizer’s statement about doses awaiting shipping instructions, while technically accurate, easily omits the explanation: It was planned that way.
Federal officials said Pfizer had committed to providing 6.4 million doses of its vaccine in the first week after approval. But federal Operation Warp Speed had already planned to distribute just 2.9 million of those doses right away. An additional 2.9 million would be held in Pfizer’s warehouse to ensure that individuals vaccinated the first week could later receive their second injection to make the protection fully effective. Finally, the government is holding a further 500,000 doses as a reserve against unforeseen problems.
Pfizer said it remains confident that 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 in Olympia, Washington contributed to this report.