For residents eager to be vaccinated and eventually return to normal life, a major bottleneck may be Massachusetts’ struggle to master the formidable logistics of mass vaccination. So far, less than half of the 1,108,975 doses Pfizer and Moderna sent to the state have been injected, according to federal data updated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.
“We use only half of what we received,” said David Williams, president of Health Business Group, a Boston management consulting firm. ‘It’s not an excuse to say because the stock is slow, we can just sit back. We must assume that there will be more supply, and we owe it to the citizens of Massachusetts to be ready when it comes. “
With the possible addition of new vaccines, from Johnson & Johnson and others, it is according to some analysts that the United States will have enough doses by September 30 to vaccinate almost everyone. This is roughly in line with Biden’s goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans in full by the end of the summer.
Governor Charlie Baker did not commit to a fixed timetable to complete the program; in fact, Baker’s three-phase plan only runs until June. “As the federal vaccine distribution program goes into high gear over the next few months,” he said in his State of the Union address this week, “anyone who wants a vaccine will get it somewhere near them.”
But as complaints about the powerful implementation of the state begin to increase, officials are opening numerous new injection centers, including seven mass vaccination sites, to speed up the state’s progress. The expansion comes as larger populations are eligible for shots, including the elderly, essential workers and residents with chronic health conditions. About 1 million residents are now eligible for reservations, the governor said.
Baker said the vaccination sites could deliver 300,000 doses weekly by mid-February, though that is far more than the state expects from the federal government in the next few weeks.
There are already signs of shortages on the new vaccination sites, even though hospitals and pharmacy businesses have hundreds of thousands of unused doses.
Legions over the age of 75 could not discuss the vaccination of vaccines through a patchwork system put together on the state website on Wednesday, the day the registration began. Doctors’ offices said they had no shots to give. Atrius Health, a network of more than 700 doctors, told patients by email that “we have not yet received sufficient vaccine from the state, and that we cannot start planning for patients aged 75 and over.”
Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which helped develop the experimental vaccine Johnson & Johnson, said the deficiencies could continue for some time.
“The short-term future of our country in the next few weeks will be extremely challenging” because there are not enough vaccine doses available to meet national demand, Barouch told the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation in a webinar Wednesday.
But he was optimistic that more doses would come from more drug companies soon, saying the “long-term future is bright.” With two vaccines created and cleared for emergency use in less than a year, he added that the development of vaccines for COVID-19 “is progressing faster than for any pathogen in history.”
Biden administration officials negotiate to buy another 200 million doses Pfizer-BioNTech and Modern. They are also awaiting the results, which are expected early next week, of the large-scale clinical trial of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Both developments could accelerate the flow of COVID-19 vaccines to Massachusetts and other states.
One viewer in the industry has questioned whether the United States will even need additional doses of Pfizer and Moderna if the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is allowed for emergency use next month.
“J&J claims that it has a lot of production capacity. We can use it, ”says Alan Carr, an analyst at Needham & Co.
The US government has pledged to buy 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine as part of a $ 1 billion deal involving the federal program Operation Warp Speed. The government has an option to buy another 200 million doses under a separate agreement. To date, it has been agreed to purchase 200 million doses of the Moderna vaccine and 200 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The government has bought together or the option to buy enough COVID vaccines to vaccinate 500 million people, far more than the entire U.S. population. Scientists estimate that 80 to 90 percent of American adults – about 300 million people – need to be vaccinated to defeat the virus by achieving ‘herd immunity’.
But uncertainties remain. No one knows what the results of the Johnson & Johnson trial will show. And there are no guarantees of success: On Monday, another drug giant, Merck, halted work on its own COVID-19 vaccine, citing inadequate immune responses.
According to Biden’s White House task force on COVID-19, a fourth potential vaccine may also be imminent. The committee said in its first press conference on Wednesday that the pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford are likely to deliver the results of a late-stage US investigation into the two-dose vaccine in March.
For states, the challenge remains to administer the vaccine dose they receive effectively. So far, most of the shipments to Massachusetts have gone to hospitals and drugstores that operated vaccination clinics at long-term care facilities. But hundreds of thousands of bottles remain in freezers. An unknown number was discussed as a second dose for people who had their first injection.
From next week, when the second phase of the vaccination program is launched, shipments will go to more sites – some are managed by contractors such as CIC Health and others by local public health agencies – and larger numbers of residents will demand shots.
The task is not only to ensure that there is enough vaccine, but also to employ enough vaccines and make the websites accessible to residents, including those in low-income communities.
Robert Weisman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at [email protected].