NASHVILLE, TN – The coronavirus vaccine roll out has been slow. Pfizer and Moderna, the two companies whose vaccines received emergency approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have not produced enough of it quickly enough.
President Joe Biden announced January 26 that the federal government is purchasing an additional 100 million doses each from Pfizer and Moderna.
“This is enough vaccine to vaccinate 300 million Americans by end of summer, early fall,” Biden said. He called the push to increase supply a “wartime effort.”
Last month, Pfizer announced that it would deliver only 25 million doses instead of 75 million because of supply chain issues. The company’s new deal with the government includes a provision for the government to use the Defense Production Act to increase the availability of key vaccine ingredients, according to reporter Tim McDonnell of Quartz, an economics and business news site.
The Trump administration placed an advance order with Pfizer for 100 million doses of its vaccine last summer. Trump’s Warp Speed chief, Moncef Slaoui, turned down an offer for an additional 100 million doses.
Instead, the U.S. provided $456 million in advance funding for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, up to $483 million for Moderna, $1.2 billion for AstraZeneca’s vaccine, $1.6 billion for Novavax, and $2.1 billion for a vaccine to be developed by Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, according to the Daily Kos. Of those five companies, only Moderna has come up with an approved vaccine.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine is only 70% effective and human subjects in its Phase Three trials got different amounts of the vaccine due to manufacturing errors. The test results indicated people who got less vaccine had better resistance to COVID-19. It is reportedly working out the kinks but predictions are that it won’t be ready before Summer 2021.
Moncef Slaoui is a former GlaxoSmithKline executive. He owns $10 million in company stock that he wouldn’t sell. He’s a Trump kind of guy. Slaoui resigned from Operation Warp Speed January 12 at the request of Biden’s transition team.
GlaxoSmithKline vaccine got the largest U.S. investment to develop a vaccine ($2.1 billion) but it was a dud. Its vaccine did not produce enough of an immune response in seniors and the company is starting all over again from scratch. Their vaccine won’t be ready before the last half of 2021 at the earliest.
The biggest order for vaccine was $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca. “Both of those have turned out to be very bad bets, and the way that these deals were structured guarantee that Americans will not have adequate vaccine supplies for months,” said Mark Summer, the editor of “Devilstower” on Daily Kos.
Summer said the Operation Warp Speed strategy was “not to put all your eggs in one basket” but that wasn’t very smart. The Trump administration made deals with all the contenders but there would be enough vaccines only if all of them produced good vaccines and only two did.
A smarter plan would have been to put in orders to “all of the manufacturers that was enough to secure vaccine for the entire nation if delivered by early 2021. The worst thing that could have happened in that case was that the nation spent a few billion on extra vaccine—vaccine that could still be sold or given to others around the world. The worst thing that could happen without such a deal … is what’s happening,” wrote Summer.
Operation Warp Speed’s big failure to produce enough vaccines has resulted in a vaccine rollout that has had to be rationed. Former President Trump, as he did with COVID-19 testing, left it up to the states to distribute the vaccines. And that has led to other problems.
In December, federal officials said that their goal was to have 20 million people get their first shot by the end of the year. However, there was no national plan to do that. More than 14 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were sent out across the United States by December 31, 2020.
But according to the CDC only 20%, 2.8 million people, got their first dose. According to the New York Times, states vary widely in how many of the doses they’ve received have been given out. South Dakota leads the country with more than 48 percent of its doses given, followed by West Virginia, at 38 percent. By contrast, Kansas has given out less than 11 percent of its doses, and Georgia, less than 14 percent.
Some states like Tennessee have held back doses to be given out to their nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities. Just 8 percent of the first doses distributed to those facilities have been administered, according to the Times.
According to the CDC, Tennessee received 838,925 doses as of January 26.
Fifty-six percent (467,933) have been administered. At that rate, it will take at least until March 2022 to vaccinate Tennessee’s population of 6.8 million.
“I have personally heard stories like this from dozens of physician friends in a variety of different states. Hundreds, if not thousands, of doses are getting tossed across the country every day. It’s unbelievable.”
Jha said this is happening because once they are thawed out for use, Covid-19 vaccines have a short shelf life. He said because of federal and state mandates, hospitals and other health care providers would rather risk a dose going bad than give it to somebody who isn’t scheduled to get a shot.
Requiring an appointment has hobbled vaccine distribution rollout in the U.S. just as it did for coronavirus testing in the first months of the pandemic. According to the World Health Organization, as much as 50% of vaccine supplies could be going to waste but nobody knows for sure how much.
Public health experts say protocols set by state and local governments to limit the distribution of the first doses to the most vulnerable populations are well intentioned but have backfired because doses are going to waste while the coronavirus continues to run rampant.
“We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” Jha said.
