Surge in vaccine supply expected after March

WASHINGTON – State and local officials across the country who are eager for more doses of COVID-19 vaccines were told last week that supply will remain stagnant for most of this month, but should surge in the last days of March through the beginning of April.

A White House official told McClatchy that flat supply over the course of March was the result of widely anticipated shortfalls from Johnson & Johnson, one of three authorized vaccine manufacturers. The supply of the one-shot J&J vaccine will increase in roughly two weeks.

Public health officials are able to see their projected vaccine supply up to three weeks in advance through a federal vaccine tracking system called Tiberius, and what they are seeing is a flat line through the end of March.

Biden administration officials also explained the supply issues in their weekly call with governors.

The administration has increased the supply of vaccines from 900,000 administered a day to nearly 3 million since Jan. 20, when President Joe Biden took office.

But demand remains so high that governors, mayors and public health officials said it is still not enough.

“Through March, the vaccine supplies have been almost flat as the ability to administer supplies grew,” Yolanda Richardson, secretary of the Government Operations Agency in California, said Thursday. “Unfortunately, like every state in the nation, we have been getting less vaccine than we need.”

California expects to receive 1.8 million doses a week in the next two weeks.

“In April, we expect that to change,” Richardson said. “We are expecting a sharp increase in vaccines starting just in the first week of April.”

In North Carolina, public health officials have been told to expect J&J shipments to resume the weeks of March 29 and April 5 and that 4 million to 6 million doses will be available nationwide each week.

And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was not expecting any shipments of the J&J vaccine “for the next two or three weeks.” The state’s top vaccine official said shipments of the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were expected to remain flat – just short of 500,000 first doses a week – for the remainder of March.

The Biden administration pushed out J&J’s entire inventory of 3.9 million vaccines once the product received emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration at the end of February.

“J&J has communicated that the supply will be limited for the next couple of weeks,” Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House COVID-19 response team, said at the time. “The company then expects to deliver approximately 16 million additional doses by the end of March.”

The lull in supply comes as the Federal Emergency Management Agency is winding down several vaccination mega sites in four of Florida’s metropolitan areas – Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville.

The Biden administration has said that other FEMA sites throughout the country would operate temporarily.

GETTY IMAGES The Biden administration pushed out Johnson & Johnson’s entire inventory of 3.9 million vaccines once the product received emergency-use authorization from the FDA.