California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged this week that vaccine distribution is slower than originally expected in Golden Gate state, but health experts hope that vaccines will increase in the new year.
Approximately 300,000 frontline workers received the first round of vaccines in the two weeks since the launch of distributions across California – although the number is well below the intended 2.4 million people in the first vaccine group.
“The fact that we have already administered 300,000 doses is extraordinary,” said Newsom during a live event on Facebook on Wednesday with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “But there has been some frustration, a little frustration – we may have promised a little more in the short term about the availability and distribution of the vaccine.”
Operation Warp Speed, the federal program that oversees the distribution of vaccines to states across the country, distributed 14 million doses of the first round of vaccines, although the number falls short of the projected distribution of 20 million vaccines by the end of December.
US Army General Gustave Perna, chief of operations for Operation Warp Speed, said the low distribution rate was also due, in part, to hospitals struggling to deliver vaccines efficiently. In Florida earlier this week, hundreds of seniors waited in line to be vaccinated under the order of arrival system currently in place.
“There is a learning curve,” Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, told reporters on Wednesday.
“Several days were lost because of holidays or snowstorms,” he added.
California initially expected to receive 2.4 million doses by the end of December, but only received 1.8 million, according to the San Francisco Chronical.
“We know that the number of doses that arrived produced less than what was originally declared,” Newsom said at a news conference on Wednesday, before adding that he was neither “shocked” nor “disappointed”.
“At this stage, I really think it’s wise for us to be a little more humble about where we are in relation to this unprecedented effort to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Americans in a very short period of time.”
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California recently enforced blockade measures after spikes in coronavirus cases, reporting more than 27,000 new cases on Thursday, contributing to more than 2.2 million cases and 25,000 deaths in the state since the pandemic began.