Millions of Vaccine Doses in the US Are on Ice, Putting 2020 Target in Question

Millions of COVID-19 vaccines are unused in U.S. hospitals and elsewhere a week after the mass inoculation campaign, casting doubt on the government’s goal of 20 million vaccines this month.

As of Wednesday morning, only 1 million injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had been administered, about a third of the first shipment sent last week. More than 9.5 million doses of vaccines, including Moderna’s, have been shipped to states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While hospitals have begun distributing Moderna’s vaccine, the CDC has yet to report that data, and there may be a delay in reporting the vaccines administered from both Pfizer and Moderna.

The slowness has barely recovered since the first week when 614,000 shots were fired, although nearly 2.9 million were sent.

Hospitals said the first COVID-19 vaccines began slowly last Monday as they navigated preparing the previously frozen injections for use, finding employees to run the vaccination clinics, and ensuring adequate social distancing both before and after vaccination. Some said they only did about 100 injections the first day.

They were dealing with an increase in COVID-19, as cases in the United States surpassed 18 million with 323,000 deaths.

The Trump administration promised to vaccinate 20 million before the end of the year, while providing little funding to achieve the goal.

It’s nine days to administer nearly 19 million vaccinations or more than 2 million people vaccinated a day, including on Christmas Day.

Nearly 5.9 million doses of Moderna Inc’s vaccine should come out this week and an additional 2 million doses from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech.

In February, Johnson & Johnson Inc and AstraZeneca Plc may approve two more vaccines.

The government’s goal is 100 million shots from Pfizer and Moderna guns by March 1.

General Gustave Perna of Operation Warp Speed, who is leading the vaccine distribution effort, said Monday that the CDC data reflects a backlog in reporting and that the number of vaccines will catch up as time goes on.

The CDC said its data may also reflect a lag between vaccine dosing and state reporting. Most nursing home vaccines only began en masse this week, and the CDC data does not specify how many doses from the first shipment were held by states for that group.

The staff stretched thin

Margaret Mary Health, a 25-bed rural hospital in Indiana, built a vaccination clinic at a local fire station and another at a local recreation center to vaccinate healthcare workers in surrounding counties, according to CEO Tim Putnam.

Putnam, who has conducted traffic control at the clinic’s drive-thru, said they have used about 400 of the 1,100 doses received.

“We are asking for volunteers from our staff, volunteers from the local community college to step in and build this process from scratch,” he said.

Some of the largest hospitals in the US inoculated more than 1,000 people a day, after testing the delivery and deployment of the vaccine.

Vermont, Delaware and Idaho are among the states that confirmed that their states had administered only thousands of doses, a fraction of those available to them, during the first week.

Jason Schwartz, assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health, described the initial count as “daunting” and said “the challenges of getting vaccines out as fast as we can make them will only grow.”

Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine could speed deployment because it requires a conventional refrigerator and does not have specialized procedures for defrosting and administering, said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association for Immunization Managers trade group. The AstraZeneca two-dose vaccine can also be stored in a refrigerator.

“When it’s stable in the refrigerator and on a one-dose regimen, it can’t get any easier than that,” Hannan said.

Hospitals start slowly but accelerate

Dr. Saul Weingart, medical director at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said the hospital had administered about 750 doses of the 3,000 available as of Friday. It started with 100 injections a day and went up to around 450, he said.

He said hospital experts modeled that administering Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine would take 10 minutes, about two to three times longer than a flu vaccine, due to the procedures required because the vaccine is stored in a freezer. Patients should socially distance themselves before and after receiving the vaccine and be monitored for allergic reactions.

The United States administers 170 million flu shots each year in a few months, but for the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States must administer about three times that many injections (Pfizer and Moderna injections are two doses) to get there. to most Americans in July. At its current rate, the United States appears to have the capacity to deliver less than a third of the injections that are sent in any given week, underscoring the gap.

A spokesman for Houston Methodist, a hospital in Houston, Texas, said it had administered the vaccine to 8,300 employees as of Monday with about 7,000 doses remaining from the first shipment.

The Keck Medicine school of the University of Southern California has vaccinated more than 3,000 employees and said it will take six weeks for all, similar to the flu vaccination schedule.

States and health departments need federal money to hire staff, from data center workers to track vaccines to call center employees and field questions, said Adriane Casalotti, head of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

The current US Congressional coronavirus aid package sets aside more than $ 8 billion for vaccine distribution, but is delayed.

“You can’t hire someone in December and train them if you don’t know you can pay them in January,” Casalotti said.

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