The Biden administration is increasing the weekly supply of COVID-19 vaccines to states and territories next week by 16% and plans to give governors more advance notice of the upcoming allocation of shots, according to several government officials informed by the White House on Tuesday .
The vaccine supply to US states, territories and Native American tribes will increase to 10 million doses next week, compared to 8.6 million and will continue for the next three weeks. Governors get a three-week forecast on their vaccines, giving them more time to draw up vaccine distribution plans.
President Biden is expected to announce later Tuesday the changes to the country’s vaccine distribution plan.
The federal government plans to purchase 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine – 100 million doses of Pfizer vaccine and 100 million doses of Moderna vaccine, participants said. Next week, the administration will send out 5.7 million doses of the Moderna vaccine and 4.3 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
This purchase increases the federal government’s total vaccine order from 400 million current doses to 600 million doses, enabling the federal government to vaccinate 300 million Americans, a senior Biden administration official told CBS News on Tuesday.
The newly purchased doses – which will be produced over the summer – are no longer on the timeline for all Americans to receive a vaccine if they want to.
“It will take a number of months before we are in a position where we can actually tell Americans that it is ‘open season’, as Dr. Fauci calls it, to sign up for vaccinations,” the senior administration official said. . said. “But with the announcement today, we have now purchased enough vaccine to vaccinate 300 million Americans, that is good news.”
Governors of both parties were met on Tuesday afternoon by Jeff Zients, coordinator of the BIDEN administration’s COVID response, disease control centers and prevention director Rochelle Walensky, and Army General Gustave F. Perna, who oversees Operation Warp Speed, the national vaccine distribution program, informed. launched by the Trump administration.
Representatives of several governors in both parties shared information from the call with CBS News.
Several government officials working for Democratic and Republican governors have expressed relief over the increased vaccine supply and the decision to give state leaders a three-week schedule.
“A three-week prospect is a lifetime” when it comes to planning, said one contestant working for a Republican governor.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont called the increase in supply and the new schedule “very useful.”
“The offer was a bit of a black box going back a month or so now,” Lamont said, according to CBS News. “We could not plan more than a week in advance.”
But some governors complained during the call that the current CDC system for detecting vaccines draws up unfair comparisons between states and territories.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told Wallensky, among other things, that the CDC’s detection system is “misleading” because some states reserve the second dose of the vaccine for people who received their first shot, while other states prefer doses. to issue when they receive them.
“Counting the second dose in the equation is misleading in my opinion,” Cuomo said.
“Security is very valuable to us,” Cuomo also said according to the sound of the call. “We have never had everything we needed through this whole Covid situation – not by the federal government or by the private sector. But just facts and certainty is a very big plus.”
Other governors have asked whether the CDC can better explain the outline of vaccine allocation to the public – how much is considered a ‘first dose’, and how much is considered a second dose. Thus, the governors stressed, it would help the public understand how quickly the shots are being distributed.
Biden administration officials also told governors that the federal government plans to continue distributing the vaccine per capita instead of speeding up distribution to states with faster, more efficient plans – an idea that has weeks driven by the Trump administration. The decision to maintain the per capita distribution is seen as a coup for smaller states concerned about vaccinating their population.
State officials also said they were impressed by the seriousness of the Biden government’s earlier outreach to governors, even during the transition from power.
“These calls were very cordial during both administrations,” said one participant, “but my boss is grateful for how serious the Biden government was in reaching out.”
Michael Kaplan contributed to this report.