Huntsville Hospital will not make any new appointments for COVID-19 vaccinations for next month due to the decline in the state’s vaccine supply.
The hospital system in northern Alabama said today that it will stop making new appointments for its community vaccination clinic until the week of March 22. People with existing appointments should arrive at their appointed time unless the hospital contacts them, the hospital said.
The hospital said state officials said they would “receive just enough vaccine for 1,000 new doses a week, which is less than half of the previous grant for Huntsville Hospital.”
“If you are one of the thousands on the waiting list, you will not receive a schedule call for at least two weeks,” the statement read.
According to the hospital, the allocation of vaccines sent from the state of Alabama to nearby hospitals has been reduced over the past few days, forcing hospitals to reduce the number of first doses they can give. The hospital said some places do not have the first doses, and more than 45,000 people are on waiting lists for vaccines in the Northern Alabama system.
The Alabama Health Officer, dr. Scott Harris, said today that the state does not receive enough doses each week to provide the transit clinics that helped Alabama give more than 76,000 vaccinations in the week of Feb. 6. The Huntsville Hospital Clinic in Huntsville did not drive through, but it did give more than 1,000 doses a day during the nationwide vaccination earlier this month.
Harris cited shipping shipments due to weather and deteriorating virus conditions at the site of a major supplier in Alabama. ‘We definitely had some questions about the delay in shipping due to the weather. “We have definitely had shipping supplies in various provinces,” he said today. ‘We had a number of provinces that, you know, received vaccines but only had clinics that were canceled. But we had clinics that simply could not be open for delivery.
“And of course there were a lot of our deliveries that came from the Memphis area to Alabama, and it obviously got worse than we do now,” Harris said.
Harris said the state is talking to vaccine manufacturers McKesson and Pfizer “directly about their deliveries every day, almost every hour, and trying to make sure all things are back on schedule.”
“It has definitely slowed down clinics for people,” Harris said. ‘We’ve had a number of calls from suppliers across the country expecting the second dose to come in, and it’s only going to be delayed for a few days. But everyone will eventually show up. ‘
AL.com reporter Dennis Pillion contributed to this report