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Federal officials promised earlier this week to stop stopping the second-dose COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and instead use them to get more people their first shots.
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This statement called on many states to open the distribution of vaccines to a wider audience this week.
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But a new report from the Washington Post says the government has not yet withheld any vaccines for second doses, and that they have already been sent out.
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As a result, many countries will not get extra vaccines in their next shipments to meet the greater demand.
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America’s vaccination cabinets are bare.
Federal officials – who on Tuesday promised to release more doses of COVID-19 vaccines to states – have virtually no surplus to spend, according to a new report from the Washington Post.
The government said it had previously built up more than 50% of the vaccine stock, saving enough doses of Pvizer and Moderna COVID-19 shots to ensure that everyone who got one shot could get their second booster on time. no matter what. (Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are given in two doses, three or four weeks apart.)
But the Trump administration has already “taken second doses directly from the production line,” according to the Post.
Read more: How the pharmaceutical Pfizer collaborated with an unknown biotechnology to develop the first authorized coronavirus vaccine in record time
The grab-and-go strategy – to send out the vaccine dosages just as fast as they were manufactured – started in December for Pfizer’s vaccine, and the same has been the case, according to Moderna, since last weekend.
A failed inventory
After President-elect Biden promised last Friday that his government would start releasing all available vaccine doses when he takes office next week, the Trump administration also announced that it is running on the same plan.
The federal government also suggested that the country could vaccinate more people by releasing more doses in this way. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar on Tuesday recommended that each state expand its vaccine distribution parameters to include everyone 65 and older, as well as younger people with the disease.
“We have achieved so much success with quality and predictable manufacturing and almost flawless distribution of the vaccine,” Azar told ABC on Tuesday. “We have withheld second doses as a safety stock. We now believe that our manufacturing is predictable enough to ensure that second doses are available to people who have continuous production, so everything is available now.”
This is something that many public health experts claim has been a good idea for some time.
“We are in a pandemic, where things are awful,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of public health at Brown University, told Insider. “We can make some hedges that say we need to hold back a few doses, but assume our production is not going to collapse completely for months and months.”
But states are already complaining that they do not have enough shots, and without more vaccines it is unclear how their spread could expand.
States have begged for more vaccines and said the stock is empty
At least nine state governors, desperate to get more shots into the arms of their citizens, also sent a letter to Washington last week saying “our states and residents now need more vaccinations.”
“According to publicly reported information, the federal government is currently withholding more than 50% of the vaccines currently being produced by the government for unknown reasons,” the letter read, citing media reports.
But state and federal officials, who were actually informed about the vaccine dose distribution plans, are now telling the Washington Post that there is no such surplus, and that most vaccine allocations will be flat next week.
One notable exception is Connecticut, a state that has vaccinated its citizens on one of the fastest cuts in the country to date. Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont tweeted on Thursday that his state will receive 50,000 extra doses next week, “as a reward for the fastest states” to vaccinate.
Nearly 30 million vaccines were distributed, but less than 10 million took up arms
Operation Warp Speed said Thursday that nearly 30 million doses of vaccine have been distributed to states so far. But shots in boxes are not equal to vaccinations in the arms.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 10 million American adults have started receiving their shots since vaccinations began in December.
“This is a crisis,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine who also develops a cheap COVID-19 vaccine, told Insider.
“Our only hope now – given how much this virus is accelerating and causing the deaths of 4,000 a day – is that we should vaccinate the American people at a rate of 1 million to 2 million a day for every day from now until the end of August.” and we are not even there. ‘
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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