CORRECTIONS
6 million doses held up; providers say they can recover
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Hazardous winter conditions delayed the distribution of 6 million doses of coronavirus vaccines this week, the White House announced Friday, hindering lifesaving vaccine drives just as they were gaining momentum.
The delayed doses amount to a threeday supply. Thousands of Americans already lost their appointments for second doses because they never arrived or the vaccination site was closed. The ripple effects are expected to stretch into next week while states await delayed shipments and scramble to get their vaccination efforts back on track.
The bad winter weather has slowed the arrival of vaccine in all 50 states, according to Andy Slavitt, the White House’s senior adviser on the government’s response to COVID-19.
President Joe Biden, speaking at a Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that manufactures coronavirus vaccine, said the weather is “slowing up the distribution” of vaccine.
Vaccine shippers — FedEx, UPS and the drug distributor McKesson — “have all faced challenges as workers have been snowed in and unable to get to work,” Slavitt said. Road closures in some areas have held up deliveries. And more than 2,000 vaccination sites are in places where power was knocked out.
Because the two vaccines allowed for emergency use — manufactured by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech and by Moderna — require various degrees of cold storage, it has been important not to risk vaccine arriving in places where scarce doses could be wasted because they could not be properly stored because of storms or power outages.
“The vaccines are sitting safe and sound in our factories and hubs,” Slavitt said.
The extent of the interruptions have been uneven, with some states announcing minimal disruption because they had reserves and others struggling to reschedule appointments. But the problems spread beyond swaths of Texas, the Southeast and the Midwest because major distribution centers in Louisville and Memphis experienced bad weather as well.
That means places spared from punishing weather, like California, have paused vaccinations while waiting for supplies from hard-hit states. San Francisco Bay-area jurisdictions announced major vaccination delays because of conditions in the Midwest, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“It’s definitely wreaking some havoc. Even if you were in sunny Arizona, your shipment has been delayed,” said Claire Hannah, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. “It came at a bad time because we had really ramped things up, and we were doing really well in improving efficiencies and getting vaccines to more sites. Hopefully we can pick up right where we left off.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti postponed more than 12,000 vaccinations at city-run sites scheduled Friday after two shipments of Moderna vaccines were delayed because planes were grounded. He said Thursday the city is automatically rescheduling many canceled slots and prioritizing second dose appointments.
“It’s a nationwide problem,” Garcetti said at a news conference. “We are in a race against time, a race between infections and injections, and anything that slows down our progress is unacceptable.”
Confusion followed when hundreds showed up to Dodger Stadium for vaccine appointments scheduled Friday morning. Some told local television station KTLA they never received a cancellation notice. Southern California has been especially hard-hit by COVID-19, with a massive winter surge that stretched hospitals to their limits and exhausted oxygen supplies.
In New York City, officials were unable to schedule more than 30,000 appointments this week and delayed the opening of new vaccination sites in Queens and Staten Island. Mayor Bill de Blasio, like other local leaders, said the weather delays aggravated an already stressed distribution system providing far fewer doses than needed.
“It’s been hand to mouth in general, and then it’s been made even worse by the storm,” de Blasio said at a Thursday news conference. “There are so many things that we could be doing right now to get tens of thousands more people vaccinated, but unfortunately, Mother Nature now is causing us the most immediate problem with these supply delays, and we of course will overcome them and keep moving forward.”
Some states are trying to calculate the toll of weather delays on vaccine distribution because of decentralized systems. For example, Maryland expected 130,000 first and second doses to arrive Tuesday and Wednesday, but officials have not finished checking with providers to see what arrived, a spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan said.
There have been few reports of vaccines spoiled because of power outages. Houston garnered some attention after officials rushed to administer more than 5,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine in one day, but Moderna later assured city leaders the thawing vials could be safely refrozen.
Despite the storm-related hiccups, vaccine providers say they are well positioned to bounce back to normalcy.
The federal government is aiming to “get the backlog of vaccines out next week,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday.
“We anticipate we cannot only get the backlog out, but we can stay on pace with what we are planning to distribute to states next week,” Psaki said. “So we are expecting we are going to be able to catch up next week.”
Virginia expects more than 100,000 doses delayed because of weather. A FedEx spokeswoman said the shipping company is responding to the disruptions at its Memphis hub by rerouting shipments to its second-largest facility in Indianapolis, as well as regional centers in Oakland, California, and Newark, New Jersey.
Slavitt, the White House official, sought to reassure people who recently lost appointments for a second shot, which both vaccines require: 21 days after the first shot for Pfizer and 28 days for Moderna. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously said people can receive their second shot up to six weeks after the first and from a different maker in “exceptional circumstances.”
“It is not a problem,” Slavitt said. “That will be accommodated completely.”