Responding to growing frustration over vaccine shortages, President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that the United States is increasing deliveries to pressured states in the next three weeks and hopes to provide enough doses to vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of the summer or early autumn.
Biden, calling the effort a “war effort”, said the government was working to buy an additional 100 million doses of each of the two approved vaccines against coronavirus. He acknowledged that states in recent weeks have been wondering how much vaccine they will receive from one week to the next.
The scarcity has been so severe that some vaccination sites in the United States have had to cancel tens of thousands of appointments with people seeking their first injection.
“This is unacceptable,” said Biden. “Lives are at stake”.
He promised an increase of about 16% in deliveries to the states in the next three weeks.
The government said it plans to buy another 100 million doses each of the pharmaceuticals Pfizer and Moderna to ensure it has enough vaccine for the long term. Even more vaccine may be available if federal scientists approve a single dose injection from Johnson & Johnson, which is expected to seek emergency clearance in the coming weeks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the government plans to make about 10.1 million first and second doses available next week, compared with this week’s quota of 8.6 million. The numbers represent the doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. It was not clear how long the dose wave could be sustained.
Governors and senior health officials have increasingly warned of inadequate supplies and the need for earlier and more reliable estimates of how much vaccine is on the way for them to plan.
Biden’s team made its first virus-related call with the country’s governors on Tuesday and promised to provide states with firm vaccine allocations three weeks before delivery.
Biden’s announcement came a day after he became more optimistic about overcoming his vaccine promise to deliver 100 million injections in his first 100 days in office, suggesting that a rate of 1.5 million doses per day could be achieved in soon.
The government also promised more openness and said it would hold press conferences three times a week, starting on Wednesday, about the outbreak that killed more than 420,000 Americans.
“We appreciate the government’s statement that it will provide states with slightly higher allocations in the coming weeks, but we will need a lot more supply,” said Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican.
The configuration inherited from the Trump administration was marked by communication failures and unexplained bottlenecks, with shortages reported in some places, even when vaccine doses remain on the shelves.
West Virginia officials, who have one of the best vaccine administration rates, said they had less than 11,000 first doses available even after this week’s shipment.
“I’m screaming” for more, said Republican Governor Jim Justice.
California, which has faced criticism over the slow launch of the vaccine, announced on Tuesday that it is centralizing its patchwork of county systems and streamlining registration, notification and eligibility. Residents are perplexed by the varying rules in different counties.
And in Colorado, Democratic Governor Jared Polis said the federal government’s limited supply of vaccine is driving the state to reuse second doses as first doses, although he hopes that people scheduled for the second injection will still be able to keep their appointments.
The weekly allocation cycle for the first doses starts on Monday nights, when federal authorities review manufacturers’ data on vaccine availability to determine how much each state may have. Allocations are based on the population of people aged 18 and over in each jurisdiction.
States are notified on Tuesday of their allocations through a computer network called Tiberius and other channels, after which they can specify where they want the doses to be sent. Deliveries begin the following Monday.
A similar but separate process for ordering second doses, which should be administered three to four weeks after the first, begins each week on Sunday night.
On Tuesday afternoon, the CDC reported that just over half of the 44 million doses distributed to the states were placed in people’s arms. This is far less than the hundreds of millions of doses that experts say will need to be administered to obtain collective immunity and beat the outbreak.
The United States is in fifth place in the world in number of doses administered in relation to the country’s population, behind Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Britain and Bahrain, according to the University of Oxford.
The reason why more injections available in the United States have not been dispensed with is not entirely clear. But many vaccination sites apparently keep large quantities of vaccine in reserve to ensure that people who have already given the first vaccine receive the second vaccine on time.
In addition, some state officials have complained about the lag between when they report their vaccination numbers to the government and when the data are published on the CDC website.
In the New Orleans area, Ochsner Health said on Monday that inadequate delivery forced the cancellation of 21,400 consultations for the first dose last week, but that consultations for the second dose were not affected.
In North Carolina, Cone Health, based in Greensboro, has announced that it is canceling first dose appointments for 10,000 people and transferring them to a waiting list due to supply problems.
Jesse Williams, 81, of Reidsville, North Carolina, said his Thursday appointment with Cone Health was crossed out and that he is waiting to know when it will be rescheduled. The former volunteer firefighter hoped that the vaccine would enable him to go back to church, play golf and see friends.
“It’s just a frustration that we expected to have our injections and be a little more resilient to COVID-19,” he said.
The vaccine’s launch in all 27 European Union countries also faced obstacles and was also criticized as too slow. Pfizer is delaying deliveries while upgrading its plant in Belgium to increase capacity. And AstraZeneca has announced that its initial shipment will be less than expected.
The EU, with 450 million citizens, requires pharmaceutical companies to meet their commitments on time.
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Associated Press writers in the United States contributed to this report.
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Find full AP coverage of the coronavirus pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic