SALT LAKE CITY – Utah is expected to receive approximately 32,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses per week to close 2020 following a “miscommunication” between the federal government and states receiving vaccine doses, a state health service spokesman said.
According to an update by the Utah Department of Health on Monday, the state has already received 25,000 doses. The new weekly estimate means that Utah is unlikely to reach the 154,000 vaccine doses it originally expected by the end of December.
Utah was one of the states to report late last week that it was not receiving as many vaccine doses as it estimated in the first week after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved by federal regulators. Army General Gustave Perna apologized for the weekend’s blunder, calling the original estimate of vaccines to be distributed a “miscommunication,” the Associated Press reported.
“I’m the one who approved the forecast forms. I’m the one who approved the allocations,” Perna said during a telephone briefing with reporters, the AP said. “There is no problem with the process. There is no problem with the Pfizer vaccine. There is no problem with the Moderna vaccine.”
It now appears that the distribution snafu has changed the number of vaccines Utah will receive by the end of the year, even though the Moderna vaccine has arrived in the state. A health department spokesman told KSL.com on Tuesday that officials in Utah now expect 16,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and an additional 16,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine each week. If that estimate is correct, it would mean fewer than 100,000 doses have been distributed to Utah by the end of the year.
It remains unclear how the adjusted numbers will affect expected timelines when certain groups, such as residents of long-term care facilities or teachers, will gain access to the vaccine.
Where are the vaccines going
It has now been a week since Utah health care facilities began vaccinating front-line workers. Not long after, the Utah Department of Health began providing statistics on COVID-19 vaccinations in the state.
As of Monday’s COVID-19 update, 6,520 have already been managed within the state. This data may not seem too exciting, as it only reflects hospital staff at this point, but it does show that the gap between when the first five hospitals in the state received the vaccine and the next 30 healthcare facilities was much smaller than it was initially thought.
The health department, which estimated in November that the gap could be as long as two weeks, reported that some vaccines had been delivered in all health districts except San Juan and TriCounty (Daggett, Duchesne and Uintah counties) within the first week of the vaccines arriving . . The first five hospitals covered only three of the 13 districts.
To no surprise, Salt Lake County – the health district with the most health care workers – had administered the most vaccines as of Monday afternoon. With 3,698 vaccines administered, it accounts for about 57% of all vaccines administered to date, according to the health department.
Understanding the emerging COVID-19 strain in the UK
A recent international story is gaining interest among researchers around the world, including in Utah.
Health officials in the United Kingdom say a new variant of the new coronavirus in the country is spreading faster than the original strain that is prominent there, suggesting a mutation. The strain, known as B.1.1.7, was first documented in September and was responsible for about a quarter of all cases by mid-November, Science Magazine reported. It rose to 60% early last week in London, which scientists say may mean the mutation is 70% more transmissible than the previous dominant species.
As noted by the New York Times, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tightened restrictions in London and many parts of South East London in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus strain. Several European countries have also banned travel from the UK due to the expanding mutation.
It’s worth noting that quite early in the pandemic, experts pointed out that SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, had already mutated into several species. The bigger questions are whether the new species is more deadly in the UK or will interfere with COVID-19’s vaccination efforts, especially if it occurs in other parts of the world.
So far, researchers say they don’t think that will be the case. In an interview with KSL TV Monday, Dr. Sankar Swaminathan, chief of the infectious diseases division at the University of Utah Health, explained that the changes happened in the spike protein the virus uses to enter human cells. He said there is no evidence that would lead experts to believe it more deadly or thwart the vaccination efforts already underway in the UK.
The vaccine, he explained, helps produce antibodies in different parts of a spike protein. So when a person is vaccinated, their immune system makes multiple defenses against the coronavirus spike protein, even if parts of it are mutated.
“While it is possible for the virus to mutate and alter its spike protein, it would be very difficult to change it so completely that the vaccine would not still elicit useful antibodies,” Swaminathan said.
Dr. Vineet Menachery, an expert on coronaviruses at the University of Texas Medical Branch, also said the new mutation in the UK is unlikely to interfere with the two available COVID-19 vaccines, during an interview with NPR on Monday.
Menachery told the news outlet that it takes years of drastic mutations for a virus to slip past a vaccine. It’s a potential long-term problem, but almost certainly not a short-term problem that would spoil current vaccination efforts.
“Vaccines that have been developed are really generated against – to generate a broad response. And so the vaccine uses our immune system to target multiple parts of the virus,” he said. “And so in this case we may have one or two parts that are different, but we’re aiming, with the vaccines, on several parts. And so it’s very difficult for a virus to overcome that in the short amount of time we have it about this. “
Swaminathan added that while the mutation could become the new dominant species, it shouldn’t stop public health officials from administering enough vaccines to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Contributing: Jed Boal, KSL TV
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