If you ask New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy why vaccinations against Covid-19 are happening so slowly, he will say the answer is simple.
“The restriction is 100 percent on supplying the feds,” Murphy, a Democrat, told a local TV station on Thursday.
Ask the feds and they will say that they distributed far more doses than the states used, leaving vaccines on the shelf.
“The heavy micromanagement of some states in this process has prevented vaccines from reaching a wider range of the vulnerable population more quickly,” said Alex Azar, United States secretary of health and human services, at a news conference on Tuesday without mention our particular states.
And if you ask vaccine manufacturers, they will say that the problem is not on their side either.
“I don’t think we have the problem of offering less vaccines than countries frankly need. We have a lot more than they can use now, ”Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC on Tuesday.
A month after the launch of a vaccine that fell short of everyone’s expectations, the transfer of guilt over who is to blame for the bottlenecks is multiplying and threatening to stop vaccinations even more. And this is frustrating for public health experts, who say the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccination team appears to be sleeping during its final days.
On Friday, several governors accused Azar of misleading them about how many doses they could expect in the near future. Azar said on Tuesday that the Trump administration planned to release a strategic dose reserve it had been holding for booster doses, but the governors said they have since discovered that there is no reserve because it was released before this week.
“I’m demanding responses from the Trump administration,” Oregon Governor Kate Brown, a Democrat, said Friday on Twitter.
“I am shocked and shocked that they have set an expectation that they were unable to fulfill, with such serious consequences,” she tweeted. “This is a nationwide mistake.”
The disappointing distribution of the vaccine, if not improved, could be a great missed opportunity to save lives, as the most recent wave of the pandemic records about 200,000 new cases per day. Coronavirus is causing up to 4,000 deaths a day in the United States
“This needs to be a government-wide and society-wide approach and instead what we are looking at is a prosecuting approach,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
Frieden said in an interview that there is so little basic information available about where the vaccine doses are in the country and what is to come, that it is difficult to know where the bottlenecks are. But he said Bourla’s comments about adequate supplies were “absurd” and that Azar was undermining the situation.
“Secretary Azar’s comments were useless. They have been misleading, inaccurate and confusing, ”said Frieden, CEO of the nonprofit health organization Resolve to Save Lives.
The country’s hesitant start to administering the Covid-19 vaccination suffered from several shortcomings, including a lack of money before Congress appropriated more in December and minimal planning in many states and localities, despite knowing for months that doses would be arriving.
The states are still lagging behind, as CDC data showed that only 36 percent of doses distributed to states were administered to people. But this week, as states increased the number of vaccination sites, the focus began to shift to the supply bottleneck.
Oregon discovered the last supply problem on Thursday night, when the state’s vaccine program manager entered the federal system to allocate vaccines to place an order and saw that there were no additional doses, according to a person familiar with the state program that spoke on condition of anonymity. State officials then spoke by phone to federal authorities and confirmed that there would be no additional dose for states to receive, the person said.
Patrick Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, sent a letter to the Trump administration asking for clarification on the federal government’s inventory of vaccines. The letter was first reported by The Washington Post.
Several states, including Oregon and New Jersey, have planned to expand vaccination eligibility for people 65 and older, in the expectation that there would be an increase in supply and the Azar recommendation.
The Philadelphia public health department said in a statement: “We do not expect a sudden increase in doses as promised by Azar and we are not considering changing our prioritization schedule to allow for broader distribution. We are concerned that the number of doses we will receive after January is even less than the paltry amount we are now receiving. “
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said on Friday that his state’s federal government allocation should drop from 300,000 doses this week to 250,000 doses next week.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, accused federal health officials of “lying” about the existence of a federal stockpile.
Azar’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. His days in government are limited, with President-elect Joe Biden having appointed California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his successor.
Dr. Marcus Plescia, medical director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, said his organization did not get a clear answer about the federal government’s reserve of vaccine doses.
“We are getting confused information about this,” he said. “But if there is no release of the doses kept in reserve, we will be challenged to increase to groups other than health professionals and LTCFs in the near future,” he said, referring to long-term institutions.
Pfizer, which with its partner BioNTech is making one of the two vaccines approved in the U.S., announced this week that it was increasing its production forecast to 2 billion doses by the end of 2021, compared to an earlier forecast of 1.3 billion. The US is expected to receive 200 million doses by July 31 from Pfizer-BioNTech.
Asked about the governors’ complaints that there was a shortage of supplies, Pfizer said in a statement on Thursday that it was on the right track.
“Make sure that Pfizer is working 24 hours a day to manufacture and release millions of doses a day and that the volume continues to grow as our business growth progresses,” said the company.
Moderna, maker of the other US-approved vaccine, earlier this month raised its production estimate from 500 million doses to 600 million doses by 2021. She said she continues to add personnel to potentially build 1 billion doses for 2021.
Still, some public health experts said they had trouble seeing any part of the vaccine supply chain that worked well.
“This is a complex system and if you look at the data we have so far, there are problems and bottlenecks and delays in the entire system,” said Bruce Y. Lee, professor of public health and health policies at New York University and executive director of the university’s PHICOR research team.
“Where is it being held? Clearly, several places, ”he said.
Lee said there needed to be more coordination on the part of the federal government, including better tracking of exactly where doses are not used, how to solve problems such as lack of syringes and people trained to administer vaccines and clear guidelines on what a vaccinator should do when you have leftover doses from open bottles.
“The federal government is the only entity with the resources, independence and authority to resolve supply chain problems,” he said.
Frieden, who served as director of the CDC under President Barack Obama, said he hoped the next Biden administration would be more organized.
“If you give a vaccination program to people who have never had a vaccination program, don’t expect it to go well,” he said. “CDC knows how to do this. The CDC is the agency that should be leading this, but it has been put aside. “