Biden tours Pfizer factory

Visit comes as cold weather delays shipment of six million doses

PORTAGE: President Joe Biden toured a state-of-the art coronavirus vaccine plant as extreme winter weather across broad swaths of the United States handed his vaccination campaign its first major setback, delaying shipment of about six million doses.

The disruptions caused by frigid temperatures, snow and ice left the White House and states scrambling to make up lost ground as three days’ worth of vaccine shipments were temporarily delayed.

The president’s trip to see Pfizer’s largest plant had been pushed back a day due to a storm affecting the nation’s capital.

At the Michigan plant on Friday,

Biden walked through an area called the “freezer farm,” which houses 350 ultra-cold freezers, each capable of storing 360,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.

Double-masked, the president stopped to talk with some workers, but it was difficult for reporters on the trip to hear what was said.

Earlier in the day, White House coronavirus response adviser Andy Slavitt said the federal government, states and local vaccinators would have to redouble efforts to catch up after the interruptions.

The setback comes just as the vaccination campaign seemed to be on the verge of hitting its stride.

All the backlogged doses should be delivered in the next several days, Slavitt said.

Biden has set a goal of administering 100 million shots in his administration’s first 100 days, and it seemed likely that could be easily accomplished before the storms.

The plant Biden toured, near Kalamazoo, produces one of the two federally approved Covid-19 shots.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the two-dose Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine has been administered 30 million times since it was authorised for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration on Dec 11.

Nonetheless, bad weather forced many injection sites to temporarily close from Texas to New England, and held up shipments of needed doses.

In Memphis, a city where some of the doses are stranded, the storm stymied 77-year-old Bill Bayne in his pursuit of his second dose.

He got his first shot on Jan 29 and was told he’d hear back about the second sometime this week. With local vaccination sites shut down, no notification came.

Bayne said the 20cm of snow outside his home is the most he’s seen in 50 years of living there.

“I want that shot bad enough,” Bayne said. “I would’ve gotten there some way.”