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Along with other states, Colorado will receive fewer doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine than expected, which Governor Jared Polis blamed on the federal government’s inability to ship available supplies.
The state expected to receive 67,860 doses next week, but is now only expecting 39,780 doses, Polis said at a press conference on Friday.
This is despite each vial of vaccine apparently containing six doses, rather than the expected five doses, Polis said.
“I really call on the federal government to get the vaccines out – Pfizer said they were sitting in a warehouse, awaiting shipping instructions,” Polis said. “The federal government must get them instructions today.”
Due to the shortage, some health workers will have to delay their first vaccination, Polis said.
Twenty-five thousand of the doses received next week will be given to residents and employees of long-term care facilities, while 14,000 doses will go to hospitals for frontline healthcare workers, Polis said, adding that the State still expects to receive 95,600 doses of the Moderna vaccine next week.
To date, 12,123 Coloradans have been vaccinated, according to a new vaccine dashboard launched by the state on Friday.
Colorado is seeing a steadily declining trend in new COVID cases “rarely seen across the country right now,” state epidemiologist Dr Rachel Herlihy said, adding that the state had “folded the curve “after Thanksgiving and” was starting to see marked improvements “in hospitalizations.
The state recorded 3,693 new cases of COVID, 1,403 hospitalized for the virus and a total of 3,321 deaths on Friday, Polis said.
The state’s positivity rate is down – to around 7% from a peak of almost 13% in mid-November, he said. The World Health Organization this spring recommended a rate of no more than 5% for communities to reopen businesses and other activities.
One in 59 Coloradans is estimated to be contagious, Polis said, down from estimates of one in 40 earlier this month.
In El Paso County, hospitalizations this week were almost half of what they were the week before, the county’s health department said on Friday. The county recorded 82 hospitalizations from December 11 to 17, compared to 160 from December 4 to 10, according to a press release. The county has seen an almost 30% drop in 14-day incidence levels, according to data available on its website. Deaths have also dropped from an average of seven days of seven on December 8 to three and a half on Thursday.
State officials have wondered why shipments of the Pfizer vaccine, the first to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for delivery, are under initial estimates when the company says she has stocks in her warehouse.
“It’s disturbing and frustrating,” Washington state governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter Thursday after learning from the CDC that the state’s allowance would be cut by 40%. “We need precise and predictable numbers to plan and ensure success on the ground.
California, where an explosion of cases is straining intensive care units to the point of rupture, will receive 160,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than state officials predicted next week.
Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire and Indiana have also been told to expect shipments smaller.
In Washington, DC, two senior Trump administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said states would receive all of their allocations, but misunderstandings over vaccine supplies and schedule changes delivery can be confusing.
One official said the initial number of available doses that were provided to states were projections based on information from manufacturers, not fixed allocations.
The two officials also said that changes made by the federal government to the delivery schedule, at the request of governors, could help create the mistaken impression that fewer doses are arriving. The key change is to space the distribution of weekly state allowances over several days to make the distribution more manageable.
“They will get their weekly allowance, that just won’t happen to them someday,” an official said.
Pfizer has made it clear that when it comes to production, nothing has changed.
“Pfizer has had no production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine, and no shipments containing the vaccine are pending or delayed,” spokesman Eamonn Nolan said in an email. “We continue to ship our orders to locations specified by the US government.”
The company said in a written statement that it “had successfully shipped the 2.9 million doses that the US government asked us to ship to locations they specified. We have millions of additional doses in our warehouse, but at this time we have not received any shipping instructions for additional doses. “
Senior administration officials said Pfizer’s statement about doses awaiting shipping instructions, while technically accurate, rightly omits the explanation: it was planned that way.
Federal officials have said Pfizer has committed to delivering 6.4 million doses of its vaccine within the first week of approval. But Federal Operation Warp Speed had already planned to distribute only 2.9 million of those doses right away. An additional $ 2.9 million was to be kept in Pfizer’s warehouse to ensure that those vaccinated in the first week would be able to receive their second injection later to make the protection fully effective. Finally, the government holds an additional 500,000 doses as a reserve against unforeseen problems.
Pfizer said it remains confident it can deliver up to 50 million doses globally this year and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.
The United States added a second COVID-19 vaccine to its arsenal on Friday as the epidemic goes through its deadliest phase to date, with the country regularly recording more than 3,000 deaths per day.
The vaccine developed by Moderna received FDA approval on Friday, paving the way for its use on Monday in the largest vaccination campaign in American history.
The goal is to vaccinate about 80% of the American population by mid-2021 to finally beat the epidemic.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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