As several states across the country say they have run out of vaccines to administer and are waiting for the federal government to get additional doses, Biden’s new team is pleading with them to hope for more.
At public press conferences on Tuesday, officials from several states said they could not move more quickly to escalate vaccination in their states until they received additional instructions on how to proceed to obtain the millions of additional doses needed to meet the growing demand.
Officials in California, New Jersey, Kentucky and New York told The Daily Beast that residents of their states had their vaccination appointments canceled as a result of low supplies. Some said the breakdown in communication with the Trump administration that had been stepping down in the past 10 days and the confusing process of navigating the transition to a new White House forced them to consider purchasing the vaccine directly from Pfizer and Moderna. Some states have already asked companies directly about the possibility of placing future orders, according to several officials familiar with their state’s planning.
“We don’t have enough supplies,” said Kentucky Governor Andrew Beshear. “Supply will be our biggest problem… and that is why we will be patient. That is why we cannot guarantee that all pharmacies in Kentucky will receive the vaccine. ” Beshear said he asked Operation Warp Speed for the federal government to double the amount of vaccine the state receives each week.
In response to growing states’ concerns about their future vaccine supply and the ability to increase their vaccination rates more quickly, President-elect Joe Biden’s team is asking states to avoid buying doses directly from companies. According to two people familiar with the plans of the next government, Biden’s team is confident that the President-elect’s plan for COVID-19, presented in a speech last week, will adequately address state concerns.
“We need to have a national approach to vaccination and ensure that states are not competing with each other as they did with PPE, ventilators and testing,” said TJ Ducklo, spokesman for the Biden transition. “We are taking aggressive measures, such as fully exercising the Defense Production Act to expand the supply of vaccines and communicate clearly with states about allocation and delivery.”
The president-elect said last week that he would significantly accelerate the distribution of the vaccine, expanding recommendations on who should get the vaccine and when. And he launched his $ 1.9 million COVID-19 plan, which provides for direct payments of $ 1,400 for most Americans, $ 350 billion in state and local aid, $ 50 billion for the COVID-19 test and an additional $ 20 billion for a national vaccine program with the state and local governments.
“It will take time to get to where we need to be. There will be stumbling blocks, but I will always be honest with you about the progress we are making and the setbacks we encounter, ”said Biden in his January 14 speech.
States struggling with the increase in hospitalizations and deaths related to COVID-19 say they don’t have time to wait for the new administration to redo the way vaccines are ordered, shipped and delivered – they’ve just gotten used to the new system. Most said they are waiting to get more information from the new administration: “We need these vaccines now,” said a state health department official.
Biden’s team did not define exactly how the new administration will adjust the distribution process. According to state officials, Biden’s team told them that the new administration will create a new version of Operation Warp Speed’s existing structure and that the vaccine program would be run at the White House and overseen by Dr. David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Part of the confusion between states is how the Trump administration’s newest federal guidelines on vaccine distribution impacted the manufacturing process. The Department of Health and Human Services, along with the Centers for Disease Control, recently released a new set of recommendations that allows states to distribute the vaccine more freely – to expand the population of those who can receive the vaccine in the first wave. The federal government also said it would start releasing doses that it originally kept in reserve for the second dose.
This change was good news for states struggling to find ways to deliver the vaccine to their residents more quickly. But those extra doses never came.
Some state officials assume that the new guidelines have increased demand for the vaccine and that the supply chain could have broken under this pressure. In other words, the number of doses ordered by states in the past two weeks could simply overwhelm the system. Other officials said they were not sure what happened, but that doses of the vaccine were not coming in completely. A report of The Washington Post he said the second doses the federal government promised to release to the states never existed. According to the report, the Trump administration had already started exploring these reserves and distributing them to states in early December.
Facing the COVID-19 crisis will be an enormous task for the next Biden government, not only because the virus is still spreading rapidly through communities in the United States, but because the new government wants to approach the federal government’s response differently than it did. President Donald Trump. The Biden COVID-19 team says it wants to re-empower career scientists and doctors and cut the red tape involved in getting what states need. This will take time, say officials working with the Biden COVID-19 task force. It will also require resources that are not yet readily available.
“That’s why we’re concerned that things are going to get worse before it gets better,” said a state health official.
The recent complaints from the states follow weeks of frustration with the launch of the vaccine by the federal government.
Days after the initial doses were sent by Pfizer in the second week of December, states reported receiving fewer doses of vaccine than expected. Officials working with Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to accelerate a vaccine, rejected state concerns, saying that a slight change in the allocation schedule caused a small delay, but that more doses of vaccine were on the way.
In the early days of vaccine distribution, state officials followed closely the CDC’s recommendations that detailed how authorities should distribute doses, including who should receive the vaccine first. Only at the beginning of this month, after vaccine rates stagnated, did the federal government start discussing redefining the CDC’s guidelines in an effort to pressure states to distribute the vaccine more freely.
On January 12, the federal government, in conjunction with the Biden COVID-19 team, told states to open vaccines for everyone in America over 65, as well as for any younger person who has a pre-existing disease that can make them more vulnerable to coronavirus. In addition to expanding access, the government said it will no longer retain doses for the second injection of the vaccine.
Now, as more and more people in the United States sign up to get the vaccine ahead of schedule, states say there is none to distribute.
The death toll in the U.S. reached 400,000 on Tuesday, the eve of Biden’s inauguration.