By Peter Szekely
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The scattered shortage of COVID-19 vaccines persisted on Saturday under pressure from growing demand, as previously vaccinated Americans returned for the second necessary injection and millions of newly eligible people struggled to get the first.
Supply gaps, emerging as the United States’ vaccination effort enters its second month, have prompted some health systems to suspend consultations for vaccine candidates for the first time and a New York health care system to cancel a lot of existing vaccines.
“As eligibility increases, you only increase demand, but we cannot increase supply,” Northwell Health spokesman Joe Kemp told Reuters by phone.
Northwell, New York’s largest health care provider, offers consultations only when it receives more vaccine and only after distributing doses to people scheduled for the second injection, Kemp said.
Although the flow of supplies has been sporadic, Northwell hopes to offer consultations next week, he added.
Both approved vaccines, one from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech and the other from Moderna Inc, require a booster three to four weeks after the first injection to maximize their effectiveness against the coronavirus.
Although health workers and nursing home residents and employees take priority, eligibility for vaccines has since increased, with some states opening it to healthy people aged 65 and over and people of any age with pre-existing illnesses .
In addition to New York, signs of vaccine supply strains have emerged in Vermont, Michigan, South Carolina, New Jersey and Oregon.
In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown said vaccinations for the elderly and educators would be delayed, while Vermont Governor Phil Scott said the state would focus exclusively on its population over 75 because of “unpredictable” federal supplies. .
NOT “EXCESSIVELY PROMISED”
“Instead of over-promising a limited supply to a wide population that we know we can’t vaccinate at once, we believe that our strategy will get shots faster and more efficiently, with less loss of life,” said Scott on Twitter.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said last week that more flexible requirements would make 7 million of New York’s 19 million residents eligible for vaccines.
New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital said on Friday it had canceled vaccination appointments until Tuesday because of “sudden changes in vaccine supply”.
An NYU employee Langone Health, another health giant, said he had suspended new consultations indefinitely because he had not received confirmation that he would receive more vaccine.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday that while the city was increasing its vaccination capacity, supplies were still arriving with “petty” 100,000 doses a week, which put it on course to dry out next week.
De Blasio was among the three dozen mayors of large cities who asked the Biden government last week to send the COVID-19 vaccines directly to them, avoiding state governments.
Jack Sterne, a state spokesman, blamed the federal government for supply problems, which he said was reducing vaccine shipments to New York next week by 50,000 doses to 250,000.
“The problem all along has been Washington’s lack of allocation and now that we have expanded the population of eligible, the federal government continues to fail to meet demand,” said Sterne by email.
Adding to the intergovernmental tension, there was a dispute in which several governors accused the Trump administration on Friday of deceptively promising to distribute millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from a stock that the U.S. health secretary acknowledged did not exist.
Since the first vaccine was administered in the United States in mid-December, nearly 12.3 million doses have been given, out of 31.2 million doses distributed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total includes 1.6 million people who received both doses, said the CDC.
Since the start of the pandemic, 23.4 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, 392,153 of whom have died, according to a Reuters count.
While critically ill patients are overwhelming health systems in parts of the country, especially in California, the national hospitalization rate has stabilized in the past two weeks and stood at 127,095 on Friday.
A model widely cited by the University of Washington projects that January will be the deadliest month of the pandemic, claiming more than 100,000 lives.
But the newly revised model from the university’s Institute of Metrics and Health Assessment projects that the monthly toll will decrease thereafter, shrinking to around 11,000 in April, as more people are vaccinated.
“On May 1, some states may be close to collective immunity,” said IHME.
(Reporting by Peter Szekely; Editing by Dan Grebler)