The U.S. government is expected to begin shipping Covid-19 directly to pharmacies next week, with one million doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine being allocated for initial implementation.
“The program is going to get one million doses of the Moderna vaccine for the first week,” Kathleen Jaeger, vice president of pharmacy care and advocacy for patients for the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, said on virtual press counseling Friday.
The administration of Biden announced this week that the vaccination of the vaccine, the federal retail pharmacy program, will be launched on February 11th. The country’s pharmacies have the capability to administer 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine within 30 days, but they need enough doses to do so, according to the NACDS.
“Ultimately, NACDS pharmacies can reach and exceed one hundred million vaccinations within a month. Yet it is important to understand that the supply of vaccines remains the rate-limiting factor in the vaccination effort,” said Steven Anderson, president and CEO of the organization, said.
The critical issue at the moment is the limited amount of vaccine.
“It’s not vaccination sites, and it’s not vaccinations, it’s the provision of the vaccine,” Jaeger said.
Jeager said the doses provided to pharmacies as part of the program come directly from the federal government, not from the supplies provided to states. She said the program will expand as more supplies become available and additional coronavirus vaccines are allowed for emergency use.
Pharmacies will still be required to comply with state-level admission requirements, which Jaeger says is a point of confusion in the nationwide implementation.
“As of the beginning of the week, we still had about six states in phase 1A, we had about 42 in phase 1B and three in 1C,” she said. ‘The big problem is that the government is asking all states to move to 65 and above. Whether the states and local jurisdictions do it or not depends on them. ‘