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The United States will not meet its goal of distributing enough coronavirus vaccine to inoculate 20 million people by the end of the year, a senior Washington official admitted Saturday, after underestimating the time it would take to verify the doses once they were produced.
Gustave Perna, the Army officer in charge of the federal government’s vaccine distribution program, said Saturday that states would not receive 40 million doses of the vaccine until the first week of January, a week later than expected.
He said he hadn’t understood how long it would take for the Food and Drug Administration to perform quality checks on Pfizer’s vaccine after it was manufactured, leading him to be overly optimistic in his projections.
General Perna told reporters on Saturday: “I did not understand exactly all the steps that must be taken to ensure that the vaccine is releasable. I failed, I am adjusting and we will move on from there. “
General Perna apologized to state governors, several of whom complained this week that their vaccine allocations had been reduced by as much as 40 percent. The head of vaccine distribution explained that he had provided initial estimates that had not taken into account the quality control process and therefore overestimated how quickly the doses could reach the states.
Under FDA rules, Pfizer must test all batches of a vaccine after they have been manufactured to make sure they are safe, pure and potent. It then has to send the results of those tests to the regulator 48 hours before they can be delivered for distribution. General Perna did not say what part of that process he had misunderstood.
The admission threatened to mitigate some of the optimism generated by the FDA’s approval Friday night of Moderna’s vaccine, making the United States the first country in the world to approve two different Covid-19 vaccines.
General Perna said doses of Moderna’s vaccine had already been shipped to McKesson, the medical logistics company that is in charge of distributing them. UPS and FedEx, the delivery companies, will begin shipping them on Sunday, and the states will begin receiving delivery on Monday.
Moderna’s vaccine can be stored at normal freezing temperatures rather than the ultra-cold conditions required for Pfizer’s product, making it a crucial part of the government’s plans to bring doses to remote communities.
General Perna said this would allow officials to immunize people in “smaller, more rural and hard-to-reach areas.” He added: “This is another historic day for our nation.”
