State health officials on Monday ordered the Walgreens pharmacy chain to send nearly 2,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine, which he did not immediately plan to administer to two Lewiston hospitals that had to vaccinate more healthcare providers.
The 1,950 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine will be sent to Central Maine Medical Center and St Mary’s Regional Medical Center after Walgreens confirmed that the pharmacy has not yet planned vaccinations at long-term care facilities with those doses, Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Long.
Walgreens and CVS deliver vaccines to long-term care facilities across the country under an arrangement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nursing homes and relief facilities have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19, and their residents are responsible for a majority of Maine’s COVID-19 deaths.
More than 4,000 residents and staff at Maine’s long-term care facilities were vaccinated a few days ago, said Nirav Shah, director of the Maine CDC. But Shah said he was concerned about the speed of the vaccine’s explosion, and asked both pharmacies if they had excess doses available and what they planned to use them for.
Walgreens’ actually had doses on hand, and they could not tell us when they indicated they would place them in their arms. It did not work for me, “said Shah. “It’s a tough call to make, but I’m willing to do it if we do not see the pace going forward.”
Walgreens representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.
Across the country, there are reports of millions of vaccines “sitting on the shelves” due to a slow rollout. But Shah said that is not the case in Maine for the vaccine doses for which the Maine CDC controls the spread. Shah said early Monday morning that 93 percent of the vaccine doses that came to the state had been used.
“In Maine, doses are not on the shelves,” he said. ‘Doses come in and are given directly to hospitals. And we worked with them to get them into their arms as quickly as possible. ”
According to the state’s vaccination panel, more than 55,000 shots were fired on Monday. Of those, nearly 50,000 were first shots; the rest were booster shots.