They are waiting for a coronavirus vaccine. For a week, her daughter, Maria, who lives in the same household with her two children, tries every day to visit the county website to make an appointment. And every time Maria is told that there is no availability.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 has devastated their densely populated part of Long Beach; last week the disease claimed the life of a neighbor.
“I can’t even walk in the park – I’m afraid,” said Requejo. “We are surrounded by Covid.”
Earlier this month, seniors in Fort Myers, Florida, spent a night in line for a local health office for the chance to get their coronavirus vaccine. In Phoenix, computer failures sent health workers across the state to remote vaccination sites.
While the reasons for the delays vary by state and province, the main causes boil down to two problems: a shortage of supply and the unpredictability of shipment sizes, say more than a dozen experts and health officials who spoke with CNN.
Meanwhile, there is concern among state and local health officials that people who have received one dose of the vaccine will not be able to get the second and final dose on time due to the stock crisis.
Some consider the logistical nightmare resulting from the lack of a central message from Operation Warp Speed, the federal initiative to inoculate Americans.
“It feels like the FBI’s plan ended at state lines, and the states expected the FBI’s plan to stop at people’s arms,” said Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, chief clinical officer for the Providence health system, which includes 51 hospitals. CNN. I think having a federal plan would absolutely end the kind of ‘Hunger Games’ approach of each individual state, where each individual province is looking for their own rules. ‘
President Joe Biden has said he plans to increase vaccinations in the coming weeks.
The vaccination rate has accelerated. Up to last week, the US administered approximately 462,000 doses per day. That has risen to nearly a million in the past week.
And the government announced that while it remains committed to delivering 100 million doses in the first 100 days – an average of 1 million per day – for now – it will boost weekly supplies, increase transparency and purchase additional vaccine of the two companies. with circulating vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna.
The goal of the plan is to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans and achieve herd immunity by the end of the summer, with the percentage of the immunized population being so high that person-to-person transmission becomes unlikely.
Demand for vaccines exceeds supply
Hotez pointed out the dangerous new variants, said time is of the essence, and stressed that other vaccines besides the two versions in use need to be approved quickly.
“The variant seems to speed up and scares everyone, including me,” said Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.
Both vaccine makers – Pfizer and Moderna – say they are on track to provide the federal government with 200 million doses each by July 31, as outlined in their contracts.
“Production and releases are not linear and we have explained that over time we have successfully increased our production revenues,” said a Moderna spokesperson.
Yet the detailed, day-to-day reality of getting vaccines into people’s arms has been a logistical nightmare for many providers across America.
Louisiana officials say they could vaccinate more people if there weren’t one big, overarching problem.
“We are simply limited by the supply we get,” said Dr. Joseph Kanter, the state’s most senior health officer and the lead physician of the state’s health department. “There is simply a lot more demand than there is vaccine available. There are a lot more people who qualify and want the vaccine than there is vaccine that we have to give.”
At the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, the massive vaccination center could vaccinate up to 2,000 people a day. But on Monday it only had 150 appointments.
“We keep the agreements for how many doses are available,” Sarah Apatov, a volunteer who administered doses, told CNN.
Health officials in Georgia said they are pushing the vaccine out as soon as possible. Dr. Lynn Paxton, Fulton County district health director, said her team has the capacity to vaccinate 50,000 people a week, but had to settle for about 10,000.
“We have to be very judicious in the way we plan our appointments,” she said. “And the most important thing I want to let everyone know is that we don’t hoard these vaccine doses in any way.”
Unpredictable shipments hinder planning
Some officials told CNN that the size of the dose shipments they received was vastly out of line with expectations, paralyzing their efforts to plan appropriately.
“The things that the federal government said it was going to do, which was to assign vaccines to states and give them an idea of how many doses they would be getting based on their population size, that in itself doesn’t even seem to play out like they said,” said Jen Kates , senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “States to counties to facilities have no predictability or visibility on how many doses they will receive, such as in a week or two, or even next month.”
Providence Health’s Compton-Phillips said the scheduling challenges have forced hospitals to refuse even those with heart disease over the age of 65.
“We say, ‘We’re sorry, but we don’t have a vaccine for you today and we’re not sure what our supply will be and we’re not sure when we can give it to you,'” she said. “So it’s a really uncomfortable position to be in.”
Lori Tremmel Freeman, of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, calls the situation a “world of uncertainty.”
“This just becomes a huge problem when they try to plan mass vaccination clinics, drive-through clinics, plans for all of these priority groups and… really get things going,” she said.
In Washington State, a surprising change to plans will likely force thousands of residents to find a new location to get their second dose.
“We had a clinic in downtown Seattle that performed more than 2,200 vaccinations a day in the past few weeks,” said Compton-Phillips of Providence. “We heard last week that our allocation was going to be cut back by 90 percent so they could take the same amount of vaccine as the state gets and distribute it … How are we going to get everyone on dose two?”
Some state officials are so frustrated with the supply shortage that they are tapping into second-dose reserves.
Last week, Colorado Governor Jared Polis ordered suppliers “to use all the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines they have, including those designated as second doses to use as first doses this week.” The guideline applied to people over 70.
Likewise, officials in Utah will reassign second doses for people who have failed to show up to receive them as the first dose within a week.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Biden should order governments around the country to assign second doses as first doses immediately.
“Start using them now,” he said on MSNBC, adding that sitting on them “makes no sense.”
A former Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity for lack of permission to comment publicly, said states that want a more predictable frequency of supplies could solve the problem by storing the vaccine for three or four weeks.
“But I don’t think states or local public health departments would like that either, because the goal is to get the vaccine out as soon as possible,” the official said. “So in that environment where you send doses at the edges of the lines coming from the lines, there’s just inherent uncertainty.”
CNN’s Drew Griffin, Nelli Black, Scott Bronstein, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Benjamin Naughton, and Casey Tolan contributed to this report.