NEW YORK (Reuters) – The scattered shortage of COVID-19 vaccines persisted on Saturday under growing demand pressure as previously inoculated Americans returned for the second blow needed and millions of newly eligible people rushed to receive their first.
Supply gaps, which emerged as the U.S. vaccination effort enters the second month, led some health care systems to suspend appointments for first-time vaccine applicants and a New York health care system to cancel a series of existing systems.
“As eligibility increases, you only increase demand, but we can’t increase supply,” Northwell Health spokesman Joe Kemp told Reuters by telephone.
Northwell, New York’s largest health care provider, offers appointments only as it receives more vaccine and only after doses have been scheduled for the second shot, Kemp said.
Although the supply flow has been sporadic, Northwell expects to provide appointments 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 shot to maximize their effectiveness against the coronavirus.
While health workers, residents and nursing home staff have been given first priority, eligibility for vaccines has since expanded, with some states opening them to healthy people aged 65 and over and people of all ages with pre-existing conditions.
In addition to New York, there have been signs of vaccine supply strains in Vermont, Michigan, South Carolina, New Jersey and Oregon.
In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown said vaccinations for seniors and educators will be postponed, while Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said the state will focus exclusively on its population over the age of 75 because of “unpredictable federal provisions.” ”.
NO “PROMISERS”
“Instead of overly promising a limited supply for a large population that we know we can’t vaccinate all of a sudden, we believe our strategy will get gunfire faster and more efficiently, with fewer casualties,” he said. Scott said on Twitter.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said last week that weaker requirements would make 7 million of New York’s 19 million residents eligible for inoculations.
Mount Sinai Hospital in New York said on Friday that it had canceled vaccination schedules until Tuesday due to “sudden changes in the supply of vaccines.”
An official at NYU Langone Health, another healthcare giant, said he had suspended the new appointments indefinitely because he had not received any confirmation that he would receive more vaccine.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that while the city is increasing its vaccination capacity, supplies are still coming in at 100,000 doses a week, which has set it to dry next week.
De Blasio was among three dozen mayors in major cities who asked the Biden administration next week to send COVID-19 vaccine shipments directly to them, bypassing state governments.
State spokesman Jack Sterne blamed supply problems with the federal government, which he said would reduce vaccine shipments in New York next week by 50,000 doses to 250,000.
“The problem over time has been the lack of allocation from Washington, and now that we have expanded the eligible population, the federal government continues to fail to meet demand,” Sterne said in an email.
Added to the intergovernmental tension is an argument in which several governors accused the Trump administration on Friday of fraudulently pledging to distribute millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine from a warehouse that the U.S. health secretary acknowledged was not there is.
Since the first vaccine was administered in the United States in mid-December, nearly 12.3 million doses have been administered, out of 31.2 million distributed doses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total includes 1.6 million people who received both doses, the CDC said.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, 23.4 million Americans have been infected with coronavirus, of which 392,153 have died, according to a Reuters report.
While seriously ill patients are stressing health care systems in parts of the country, especially in California, the national hospitalization rate has dropped in the past two weeks to 127,095 on Friday.
A large model cited by the University of Washington projects that January will be the deadliest month of the pandemic, causing more than 100,000 lives.
But the university’s new revised model for health metrics and assessments projects that the monthly fee will drop thereafter, to about 11,000 in April, as more people are vaccinated.
“By May 1, some states could be close to staff immunity,” IHME said.
Reporting by Peter Szekely; Edited by Dan Grebler