If you ask the New Jersey government, Phil Murphy, why the vaccinations with Covid-19 are happening so slowly, he would say the answer is simple.
“The limit is currently 100 percent of the feds,” Murphy, a Democrat, told a local TV station on Thursday.
Ask the collaborators, and they will say that they distributed far more doses than the states used, leaving the vaccines on the shelf.
“Some countries’ cumbersome management of this process has stood in the way of vaccines reaching a wider section of the vulnerable population more quickly,” Alex Azar, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, told a news conference Tuesday. without singing. from certain states.
And if you ask the vaccine makers, they will say that the problem is not on their side either.
“I do not think there is a problem in offering fewer vaccines than the countries honestly need. “We have a lot more than they can use at the moment,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC on Tuesday.
A month after a vaccination that did not meet everyone’s expectations, the blame for who is to blame for the bottlenecks shifts, increases and threatens to further disrupt vaccinations. And it’s frustrating for public health experts to say that the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccination team is apparently sleeping through its last days.
Several governors accused Azar on Friday of misleading them about how many doses they could expect in the near future. Azar said Tuesday that the Trump administration plans to release a strategic reserve of doses it has held back for boost shots, but governors said they have since learned there is no reserve because it has already been released this week. .
“I demand answers from the Trump administration,” said Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat. Said on Twitter on Friday.
“I am shocked and shocked that they set an expectation that they could not meet, with such serious consequences,” she tweeted. “This is a deception on a national scale.”
The disappointing spread of vaccines, if not improved, could be a great chance to save lives, as the most recent spate of the pandemic covers about 200,000 new cases a day. The coronavirus causes as many as 4,000 deaths a day in the US
“It should be an approach of the whole government, the whole society, and instead it is a finger-pointing approach,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Frieden said in an interview that there is so little basic information available about where the country’s vaccine doses are and what’s coming, that it’s hard to know where the bottlenecks are. But he said Bourla’s comments about adequate supply were “nonsense” and that Azar was hurting the situation.
‘Secretary Azar’s comments were useless. They were misleading, inaccurate and confusing, “said Frieden, chief executive of the health care organization Resolve to Save Lives.
The cessation of the Covid-19 vaccination initiative has led to several failures, including a shortage of funds before Congress approved more in December and minimal planning by many states and communities, despite months of would know that doses would come.
States are still behind, as CDC data showed Friday that only 36 percent of the doses distributed to states were administered to humans. But this week, as states increased the number of vaccination sites, the focus began to shift to the bottleneck in supply.
Oregon discovered the latest supply problem late Thursday when the state’s vaccine program manager entered the federal vaccine dispensing system to place an order and saw that there were no additional doses, according to a person familiar with the program. of the state, which spoke of anonymity. State officials subsequently telephoned federal officials and confirmed that there are no additional doses for states to receive, the person said.
Patrick Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, sent a letter to the Trump administration seeking clarification on the federal government’s vaccination stock. The letter was first reported by The Washington Post.
Several states, including Oregon and New Jersey, have planned to be eligible for vaccinations for people 65 and older, with the expectation that there would be an increase in supply and on Azar’s recommendation.
The Philadelphia Department of Public Health said in a statement: ‘We no longer expect an increase in doses as promised by Azar, and we are not considering changing our priority scheme to allow for wider distribution. We are concerned that the amount of doses we will receive after January will be even less than the meager amount we are receiving now. ”
New York Democrat Andrew Cuomo’s government said Friday that the federal government’s allocation will drop from 300,000 doses this week to 250,000 doses next week.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has accused federal health officials of ‘lying’ about the existence of a federal stock.
Azar’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. His days in government are limited, and President-elect Joe Biden has named California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his successor.
Dr Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of Civil Servants and Territorial Health Officers, said his organization had not received a clear answer about the reserve of federal government vaccine doses.
“We get mixed information about this,” he said. “But if there are no doses available in the reserve, we will be challenged to increase to other groups outside health care workers and LTCFs in the near future,” he said.
Pfizer, which together with its partner BioNTech makes one of the two vaccines in the US, announced this week that it will increase its production estimate to 2 billion doses by the end of 2021, compared to a previous estimate of 1.3 billion. The US will receive 200 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech by July 31.
Asked about complaints from governors that there was a shortage of supply, Pfizer said in a statement on Thursday that it was on track.
“Rest assured that Pfizer is manufacturing and preparing millions of doses every day 24 hours a day and that the volume continues to grow as our commercial boom progresses,” the company said.
Moderna, the manufacturer of the other vaccine approved by the US, increased its production estimate earlier this month from 500 million doses to 600 million doses by 2021. According to him, he continues to add staff to build up doses by 2021 .
Yet some public health experts have said they struggle to see any part of the vaccine supply chain working well.
“It’s a complicated system, and if you look at the data we’ve had so far, there’s problems and bottlenecks along the system,” said Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of public health and health policy at the City. , said. University of New York and executive director of the university’s PHICOR research team.
‘Where does it end? It is clear that there are several places, ‘he said.
Lee said the federal government needs to coordinate more, including better tracking of where doses are being misused, how to solve problems such as syringes and people trained to administer vaccinations, and clear guidelines on what a vaccine should do. do if they exceed doses of opened vials.
“The federal government is the one entity with the means and the independence and the authority to tackle supply chain problems,” he said.
Frieden, who served as CDC director under President Barack Obama, said he was hopeful that Biden’s incoming government would be more organized.
“If you give a vaccination program to people who have never had a vaccination program, you should not expect it to run smoothly,” he said. ‘CDC knows how to do it. CDC is the agency that should lead it, but they have been eliminated. ”