For residents eager to be vaccinated and eventually return to normal life, a major bottleneck may be Massachusetts’ struggle to master the formidable logistics of mass vaccination. So far, less than half of the 1,108,975 doses of Pfizer and Moderna sent to the state have been injected, according to federal data updated Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We are using only half of what we received,” said David Williams, president of the Health Business Group, a management consulting firm in Boston. “It is not an excuse to say why supplies are running low, we can just sit. We must assume that there will be more supply and we owe it to the citizens of Massachusetts to be ready when we arrive. “
With the possible addition of new vaccines by Johnson & Johnson and others, some analysts project that the United States could have enough doses to vaccinate almost everyone by September 30. This is almost in line with Biden’s stated goal of fully vaccinating 300 million Americans by the end of the summer.
Governor Charlie Baker has not committed to a firm timetable for completing the program; in fact, Baker’s three-phase plan runs through June. “As the federal vaccine distribution program goes up in the coming months,” he said in his State of the Community address this week, “anyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get it from a location close to them” .
But as complaints about the state’s stubborn implementation have increased, officials are opening several injection centers, including seven mass vaccination sites, to accelerate the state’s progress. The expansion occurs as much larger populations become eligible for vaccines, including the elderly, essential workers and residents with chronic health conditions. About 1 million residents are now eligible for reservations, the governor said.
Baker said vaccination sites will be able to deliver 300,000 weekly doses by mid-February, although that is a long way off. more than the state expects to receive from the federal government in the coming weeks.
There are already signs of scarcity in the new vaccination sites, even when hospitals and pharmaceutical companies have hundreds of thousands of unused doses.
Legions of residents over 75 were unable to schedule vaccines through a patchwork system set up on a state website on Wednesday, the day the registration began. And doctors’ offices said they had no injections to administer. Atrius Health, a network of more than 700 doctors, sent an email to patients saying that “they have not yet received enough vaccine supplies from the state and we cannot start programming our patients aged 75 or older.”
Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Virology and Vaccines Research Center, who helped develop the Johnson & Johnson experimental vaccine, said the shortage could continue for a while.
“Our country’s short-term future in the coming weeks will be extremely challenging” because there are no doses of vaccine available to meet national demand, Barouch said. Network of Excellence in Health Innovation in a webinar on Wednesday.
But he was optimistic that more doses will come from more pharmaceutical companies soon after that and said that “the long-term future is bright”. With two vaccines already created and released for emergency use in less than a year, he added, the development of the vaccine for COVID-19 “is happening faster than for any pathogen in history”.
Biden government officials are negotiating to buy another 200 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. They are also awaiting the results, expected early next week, of the large-scale Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Both developments could accelerate the flow of COVID-19 vaccines to Massachusetts and other states.
An industry observer questioned whether the United States would even need additional doses of Pfizer and Moderna if the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is authorized for emergency use next month.
“J&J claims to have a lot of production capacity. We could use that, ”said Alan Carr, an analyst at Needham & Co.
The US government has pledged to buy 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as part of a $ 1 billion deal involving the federal Operation Warp Speed program. The government has the option to purchase an additional 200 million doses through a separate agreement. To date, the purchase of 200 million doses of the Moderna vaccine and 200 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is combined.
Together, the government has purchased or has the option to purchase enough COVID vaccines to vaccinate 500 million people, far more than the entire US population. Scientists estimate that 80 to 90 percent of American adults would need to be vaccinated – about 300 million people – to defeat the virus by achieving what is known as “herd immunity”.
But the uncertainties remain. No one knows what the Johnson & Johnson test results will show. And there are no guarantees of success: on Monday, another drug giant, Merck, stopped work on its own COVID-19 vaccine, citing inadequate immune responses.
A potential fourth vaccine may also be on the horizon, according to the new Biden White House task force at COVID-19. At its first news conference on Wednesday, the committee said that pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford are likely to provide the results of a United States trial of the last phase of the two-dose vaccine in March.
For the states, the challenge remains to efficiently administer the doses of the vaccine they receive. So far, most shipments to Massachusetts have been to hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that run vaccine clinics in long-term care facilities. But hundreds of thousands of bottles remain in freezers. An unknown number was reserved as a second dose for people who received their first injection.
Starting next week, when the second phase of the vaccination program will be launched, shipments will go to more locations – some managed by third-party companies, such as CIC Health and others by local public health agencies – and more residents will require injections.
The task will not only be to ensure that there is enough vaccine, but also to hire vaccinators and make the sites accessible. for residents, including those in low-income communities.
Robert Weisman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at [email protected].