In the midst of a slower-than-expected COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is still missing one crucial piece of information: the amount of vaccine doses that is currently available.
“One of the biggest problems right now is I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have,” new CDC director Rochelle Walensky, M.D., M.P.H., told Fox News Sunday‘s Chris Wallace this weekend. “And if I can’t tell it to you, then I can’t tell it to the governors, and I can’t tell it to the state health officials.”
That makes it pretty hard for states to map out their vaccine distribution plans in the coming weeks. “If they don’t know how much vaccine they’re getting—not just this week but next week and the week after—they can’t plan,” Dr. Walensky said. “They can’t figure out how many sites to roll out, they can’t figure out how many vaccinators that they need, and they can’t figure out how many appointments to make for the public.” If a state overestimates the incoming vaccine supply, the result is long lines and cancelled appointments, Dr. Walensky explained; it if underestimates how much vaccine it will receive, that could leave unused doses sitting on the shelf. “Either way, we have challenges.”
This knowledge gap is something that the new Biden-Harris administration inherited from the previous one, according to Dr. Walensky. “The fact that we don’t know today, five days into this administration, and weeks into planning, how much vaccine we have just gives you a sense of the challenges we’ve been left with,” she said.
While not having a grasp on the current supply situation is a huge obstacle for planning, the broader problem is the tight supply itself. “The supply is probably going to be the most limiting constraint early on,” Dr. Walensky said. (The administration is still on track to meet its goal of 100 million doses in 100 days, but containing the virus will ultimately require even more widespread vaccination than that.)
Dr. Walensky is optimistic, though, that we’ll overcome the “current supply crunch” in the coming months, as production ramps up and more vaccines, like a promising candidate from Johnson & Johnson, receive emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “From the data that I’ve seen so far, I’m hopeful that we’ll actually get an increasing amount of supply, not a stagnating one,” she said. “By the end of March or so, I really do hope that our production has scaled up dramatically and that we actually have way more supply than we do right now.”
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