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O’FALLON, Mo. (AP) – Several states say they were told to expect significantly fewer doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in its second week of distribution, raising concerns about potential delays in vaccines for health workers and long-term care residents.
But on Thursday, senior Trump administration officials downplayed the risk of delays, citing confusion over semantics, while Pfizer said its production levels had not changed.
The first American doses were administered on Monday, and already this week, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly health workers, have been vaccinated. The pace is expected to increase next week, assuming Moderna obtains federal authorization for its vaccine.
Efforts to help stave off coronavirus come amid staggering death toll that has surpassed 300,000 Monday. Johns Hopkins University reports that approximately 2,400 people die each day in the United States, which averages over 210,000 cases per day.
In recent days, governors and health leaders in at least a dozen states have said the federal government has told them that next week’s shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be lower than initially forecast.
Few explanations have been offered, leaving many officials perplexed.
“It’s disturbing and frustrating,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter Thursday after learning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 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 breaking point, will receive 160,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than state officials predicted next week – a reduction of about 40 %.
California hospitals began immunizations this week from Pfizer’s first shipment of 327,000 doses and expected more to arrive next week. Instead, officials were told to expect around 233,000 doses, said Erin Mellon, spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Missouri health director Dr Randall Williams said his state would receive 25 to 30 percent less vaccine next week than expected. A statement from the Iowa Department of Public Health said his allocation would be “reduced by 30%, but we are working to get confirmation and further details from our federal partners.”
Michigan shipping will drop by about a quarter. Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Indiana have also been told to expect smaller shipments.
Gov. Brian Kemp said Thursday that Georgia was set to receive 60,000 doses next week after initially expecting 99,000. Yet the Republican Gov. had little but praise for the vaccination effort and failed. is not strongly opposed to the decrease in the amount.
“I wish it was a lot more, but it might suck right now if you look at the past history of vaccines,” Kemp said.
In Washington, DC, two senior Trump administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning said states would receive all of their allocations, but misunderstandings over vaccine supply and changes to the delivery schedule can be confusing.
An official said the initial numbers of available doses that were provided to states were projections based on information from manufacturers, not fixed allocations. Some state officials may have misunderstood this, the official said.
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 this week it “successfully shipped the 2.9 million doses that the US government asked us to ship to locations it 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.
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Alonso-Zaldivar contributed Washington, DC Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington contributed to this report.
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