The Federal Emergency Management Agency will have six vaccination sites with military personnel in place next week, including a site in Los Angeles that opened on Tuesday morning, said acting administrator Bob Fenton.
There is an additional FEMA location in Oakland with civilian staff.
The locations in Houston, Dallas and Arlington, Texas, as well as Queens and Brooklyn in New York, are scheduled to open next Wednesday, said General Glen VanHerck, commander of the United States Northern Command, speaking on a conference call.
The sites are a combination of teams of 222 “type 1” people, with capacity for 6,000 vaccinations per day, and “type 2” teams of 139 people, with capacity for 3,000 vaccinations per day.
In total, they will bring FEMA’s total vaccinations to 30,000 vaccinations per day in all locations. The detachments will include approximately 1,000 soldiers from the Air Force, Navy, Marines and Army. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin initially authorized the summons of 1,110 soldiers to assist with vaccination efforts, then added an additional 3,700 soldiers.
FEMA has its own supply of vaccine doses to administer and will not use vaccines from the state allocation, said Fenton. That supply is 11 million doses per week now, Fenton said, and is expected to increase to 13.5 million doses next week.
“This is a dedicated supply above and beyond the state’s allocation, above and beyond what pharmacies are receiving, and in a pilot phase now,” said Fenton.
There are currently no pending requests from states or territories for additional vaccination sites, added Fenton.
The Pentagon has also deployed teams of less than 25 soldiers to help in New Jersey and the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is separate from the troops used for vaccination sites.
Initial discussions with FEMA called for 100 teams capable of delivering a total of 450,000 vaccines per day, far more than the planned locations will be able to deliver.
Fenton explained that the order for so many teams was based on the availability of more vaccines in the near future.
“How much will we have to reach these 100 teams? It depends on how much pharmacies can do, how much states and local governments can deal with and what the gap is,” said Fenton. “We want to make sure we have the capacity to reach almost 500,000 vaccines a day. That’s what the 100 teams buy from us. How much we use will depend on the vaccine supply and the capacity of the state and local government, pharmacies and other avenues. “
In the past three weeks, FEMA has also provided $ 3.2 billion to 40 states and territories to improve their capacity and resources, said Fenton.