The Biden government told Louisiana officials that coronavirus vaccine shipments will not increase much for at least a month, the latest challenge to the state’s effort to increase vaccinations.
The revelation that remittances will not increase – which has long been a promise made to states by federal officials – means that Louisiana is unlikely to be able to host mass vaccination events anytime soon, Governor John Bel Edwards told a news conference on Friday .
Vaccine shipments to the state this week and next are expected to remain stable at around 58,000 doses per week, with a potential increase of just 5% to 10% during most of February. Louisiana received nearly equal shipments of vaccine doses last month, Edwards said, amid supply problems that are affecting distribution in the United States.
“Everyone was working on the assumption that, over time, industrial production would increase and allocations would also increase,” said Edwards. “If you go back and look at the representations that were made in November and December, we always believed that there would be an increase in appropriations. This will happen at some point. This is simply not happening yet. This presents some problems. “
Edwards said the pace of shipments will not affect patients’ ability to receive second doses needed for full protection.
The Trump administration for months said vaccine production would increase rapidly after they were authorized. And just before Biden took office, senior Trump administration officials announced that they would no longer withhold second doses, a change in policy that suggested more doses would soon be on their way to the states.
But even when states anticipated an increase in supply, they soon learned that the federal government had already run out of stock.
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President Joe Biden promised a stronger response to the coronavirus pandemic, including a reinforced vaccination effort. He set a goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office, instructed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to establish vaccination centers and is allowing agencies to use the Defense Production Act, which allows the government to purchase supplies of private industry during times of emergency.
But increasing vaccine supplies will still take time, and flat remittances will delay Louisiana’s passage through priority groups that determine who is eligible for a vaccine. Without a big jump in doses, this will likewise limit the need to use vaccination sites designed to take doses to wider ranges of the public and bring the state of collective immunity closer.
It is not clear how big a setback for the state’s plans is. Edwards hesitated to reveal deadlines for when different groups could have access to the vaccine, citing uncertainties about the supply.
About 272,000 people received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in Louisiana, according to the latest state data. That represents less than a third of the nearly 900,000 people who are currently eligible to receive the vaccine, said Dr. Joe Kanter, state health officer for the Louisiana Department of Health, although it is unknown how many of those people want the vaccine.
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He said the state is coordinating with suppliers to find out when demand starts to drop, at which point the state will expand the priority group to the next level, which includes a list of essential workers. It is unclear which trigger the state intends to use, although Edwards has suggested that when nomination acceptance drops to 80%, the state may expand eligibility. Currently, people aged 70 and over and many health professionals, as well as people who live or work in long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes, are eligible for vaccination.
Kanter also said the Trump administration’s announcement was part of the reason why Ochsner Health, Louisiana’s largest health care institution, overestimated the supply it believed would reach the state.
Ochsner had scheduled more than 100,000 vaccine appointments for the next few weeks, but last week said he would have to postpone thousands of them after the system received no vaccine on its regular shipment. Thereafter, the state diverted a relatively small number of doses to the system to help fill the gap. Ochsner officials said last week that they and the state were under the impression that more doses would come from the feds than actually arrived.
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Edwards said that US governors “are all asking for the same thing. We want more vaccine as soon as we can get it. “
He also said that state leaders want more waiting time between shipments. Currently, the feds give states an estimate of how many doses they will receive the following week, on Tuesday. On Thursday, the federal government finalizes the number, and the state must place orders for shipments to suppliers.
Louisiana had a slow start to the vaccination effort in December, when the state was allowing vaccinations only for frontline health professionals and people who live and work in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, which are administered by a federal partnership with CVS and Walgreens.
Since then, the state has picked up the pace. Data from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Louisiana ranks 11th among states and the District of Columbia in the number of doses administered per capita.
Delays in obtaining more vaccines are not unique to Louisiana. In Alabama, officials said they are receiving about half of the vaccine doses they expected, based on federal plans announced last year. Oregon Governor Kate Brown has postponed vaccines for the elderly after learning that the state’s vaccine shipments will not increase recently.
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Edwards said his administration is busy reviewing executive actions taken by the Biden administration, which include a waiver from the states’ cost division for COVID expenses that could save millions in Louisiana.
“It’s been a little bit slower, obviously, than we would like,” said Edwards of vaccine shipments.
“We are eagerly awaiting the increase in allocations.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.