State health officials on Monday ordered Walgreens drugstore chain to send nearly 2,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine that it had no immediate plans to administer to two Lewiston hospitals that needed to vaccinate more health workers.
According to a spokesperson for the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Long.
Walgreens and CVS are administering vaccines at long-term care facilities across the country, under an agreement with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nursing homes and assisted living facilities have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19, and its residents are responsible for the majority of Maine’s COVID-19 deaths.
More than 4,000 residents and staff at Maine’s long-term care facilities were vaccinated under the arrangement a few days ago, said Maine CDC director Nirav Shah. But Shah said he was concerned about the speed of implantation of the vaccine and asked the two pharmacies if they had excess doses on hand and what their plans were for using them.
Walgreens “actually had doses on hand and they couldn’t tell us when they indicated they would put them in their arms. It didn’t work for me, ”said Shah. “It is a difficult decision to make, but I am prepared and we will continue to do so if we do not see that pace increase in the future.”
Walgreens representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.
Across the country, there have been reports of millions of vaccines “stuck on the shelves” because of a slow release. But Shah said that is not the case in Maine for vaccine doses for which the Maine CDC controls distribution. By early Monday morning, Shah said, 93% of the vaccine doses that reached the state had been used.
“In Maine, doses are not on the shelves,” he said. “The doses arrive and are allocated directly to hospitals. And we’ve been working with them to get them to the guns as soon as possible. “
More than 55,000 vaccines have been applied as of Monday, according to the state’s vaccination panel. Almost 50,000 of those were the first shots; the rest were booster doses.