(Reuters) – Millions of COVID-19 vaccines sit unused in US hospitals for a week and a week elsewhere in the massive vaccination campaign, calling into question the government’s target of 20 million vaccinations this month.
Wednesday morning, only 1 million injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had been given, about a third of the first shipment shipped last week. More than 9.5 million doses of vaccines, including those from Moderna, have now been sent to states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While hospitals have begun to issue Moderna’s vaccine, the CDC has not yet reported that data and there may be a delay in reporting withdrawals from both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
The slow pace has hardly improved since the first week when 614,000 shots were delivered, although nearly 2.9 million were sent.
Hospitals said the first COVID-19 vaccinations started slowly last Monday as they navigated to prepare the previously frozen shots for use, find workers to run the vaccination clinics, and ensure good social distance both before and after the vaccination. Some said they only took about 100 shots on the first day.
They faced a COVID-19 surge as cases in the United States surpassed 18 million with 323,000 deaths. (Image: tmsnrt.rs/34pvUyi)
The Trump administration pledged to vaccinate 20 million by the end of the year, with little money available to achieve the goal.
That’s nine days to give nearly 19 million injections or more than 2 million people getting vaccinated every day, including on Christmas Day.
Nearly 5.9 million doses of Moderna Inc.’s vaccine should go out this week and another 2 million doses from Pfizer and partner BioNTech.
“The commitment we can make is to make vaccine doses available,” said Operation Warp Speed’s chief adviser, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, on Wednesday during a press call. He noted that the number of people getting a shot in their arm is “slower than we thought.”
Two more vaccines could be approved by Johnson & Johnson Inc and AstraZeneca Plc in February.
The government’s target is 100 million Pfizer and Moderna gunshots by March 1.
General of Operation Warp Speed, Gustave Perna, who leads vaccine distribution, said on Monday that the CDC data reflects a reporting delay and the number of vaccinations will catch up over time.
The CDC said the data may also indicate a delay between vaccine dosing and state reporting. Most nursing home vaccinations just started massively this week, and the CDC data does not indicate how many doses of the first shipment were held by states for that group.
STAFF STRETCHED THIN
Margaret Mary Health, a 25-bed nationwide hospital in Indiana, built a drive-thru vaccination clinic at a local fire station and one at a local recreation center to vaccinate health workers in surrounding counties, Chief Executive Officer Tim Putnam said.
Putnam, who conducted air traffic control at the clinic’s drive-thru, said they used about 400 of the 1,100 doses received.
“We are asking volunteers from our staff, volunteers from the local community college to step in and build this process from the ground up,” he said.
Some of the largest U.S. hospitals have vaccinated more than 1,000 people a day after delivering and rolling out vaccines.
Vermont, Delaware, and Idaho were among states that confirmed that their states had only given thousands of doses for the first week – a fraction of the doses available to them.
Jason Schwartz, assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health, described the initial number as “daunting,” saying, “The challenges of making vaccines as quickly as we can produce them are only going to increase.”
Johnson & Johnson’s one-time vaccine could speed implementation because it requires a conventional refrigerator and does not have specialized procedures to thaw and administer, said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association for Immunization Managers trade group. The vaccine with two doses of AstraZeneca can also be stored in the refrigerator.
“If it’s refrigerator stable and it’s a single dose, it couldn’t get any easier,” said Hannan.
HOSPITALS START SLOW, BUT ACCELERATE
Dr. Saul Weingart, the chief medical officer at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said the hospital had given about 750 of the roughly 3,000 available doses on Friday. It started with 100 shots a day and worked up to about 450, he said.
He said experts in the hospital had modeled that giving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine would take 10 minutes, about two to three times as long as a flu shot, because of the procedures required because the vaccine is put in a freezer room. preserved. Patients should be socially distanced before and after vaccine administration and monitored for allergic reactions.
The United States gives 170 million flu vaccinations every year within a few months, but for the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has to give about three times as many injections – the Pfizer and Moderna injections are two doses – to reach most Americans with July. At the current rate, the US appears to have the capacity to manage less than a third of the shots shipped in any given week, underscoring the gap.
A spokesman for Houston Methodist, a hospital in Houston, Texas, said it had given 8,300 workers the vaccine as of Monday with about 7,000 doses left from the first shipment.
The University of Southern California’s Keck Medicine medical school has vaccinated more than 3,000 employees and said it will take six weeks for everyone, similar to the flu vaccination schedule.
States and health departments need federal money to hire staff, from data center workers to monitor vaccinations to call center workers to field inquiries, said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
The current coronavirus aid package from the US Congress sets aside more than $ 8 billion for vaccine distribution, but has been delayed.
“You can’t hire someone and train them in December if you don’t know you can pay them in January,” Casalotti said.
Reporting by Rebecca Spalding and Carl O’Donnell; additional reporting by Deena Beasley in Los Angeles; Adaptation by Caroline Humer and Lisa Shumaker