Vaccine stockpiles in question as new COVID variant expands

We’re currently in a race against the coronavirus. A new, more contagious variant is starting to spread, while reports suggest that vaccine doses in the United States may be in short supply.

A COVID-19 variant “has the potential to increase the U.S. pandemic trajectory in the coming months,” the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

“Higher vaccination coverage might need to be achieved to protect the public,” the CDC wrote in its weekly COVID-19 report.

Also on Friday, The Washington Post reported that federal vaccine reserves were empty. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said on Twitter that her state and others would not be getting promised vaccine doses.

“States will not be receiving increased shipments of vaccines from the national stockpile next week, because there is no federal reserve of doses,” she tweeted, saying it was confirmed to her “directly by General (Gus) Perna of Operation Warp Speed.”

Brown called it “a deception on a national scale.”

Gov. Ned Lamont said Thursday that Connecticut expects to receive 50,000 extra vaccine doses from the federal government.

“We were told we’re getting the extra doses this week, and there have been discussions since then with feds confirming that. And there has been nothing from the feds at this point to suggest we’re not going to receive them,” Lamont spokesman Max Reiss said Saturday.

The new variant about which CDC expressed concern, known as B.117, was first discovered in the United Kingdom. Two cases were identified in Connecticut on Jan. 6, and there are 88 total cases in 15 states so far.

Though it’s not associated with increased mortality, it’s estimated that B.117 is 50 percent more contagious than the currently dominant strain of the coronavirus.

“The increased transmissibility of the B.117 variant warrants rigorous implementation of public health strategies to reduce transmission and lessen the potential impact of B.117, buying critical time to increase vaccination coverage,” the CDC said.

Mary Petrone, who is part of the team at the Yale School of Public Health that identified the variant in Connecticut, said she expected it to become more prevalent.

“My sense is that it’s still at a low level right now, which is really good news,” Petrone said. “I can’t definitely put a number on prevalence. I would say it’s probably low. And I think that we should expect it to increase in the next couple of months pretty dramatically.”

As of Thursday, 171,035 doses of vaccine had been administered in Connecticut.

Henning Bagger / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP via Getty Images A researcher at Aalborg University looks at samples from behind a safety screen in Aalborg, Denmark, on Thursday.