@MorningLover wrote:
Here's an article I found from apnews
......In Washington, D.C., two senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning said states will receive their full allocations, but misunderstandings about vaccine supply and changes to the delivery schedule may be creating confusion.
One official said the initial numbers of available doses that were provided to states were projections based on information from the manufacturers, not fixed allocations. Some state officials may have misunderstood that, the official said.
The two officials also said that changes the federal government made to the delivery schedule, at the request of governors, may be contributing to a mistaken impression that fewer doses are coming. The key change involves spacing out delivery of states’ weekly allocations over several days to make distribution more manageable. “They will get their weekly allocation, it just won’t come to them on one day,” one official said.
Pfizer made it clear that as far as production goes, nothing has changed. “Pfizer has not had any production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine, and no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed,” spokesman Eamonn Nolan said in an email. “We are continuing to dispatch our orders to the locations specified by the U.S. government.”
The company said in a written statement that this week it “successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses that we were asked to ship by the U.S. Government to the locations specified by them. We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.”
The senior administration officials said Pfizer’s statement about doses awaiting shipping instructions, while technically accurate, conveniently omits the explanation: It was planned that way.
The federal officials said Pfizer committed to provide 6.4 million doses of its vaccine in the first week after approval. But the federal Operation Warp Speed had already planned to distribute only 2.9 million of those doses right away. Another 2.9 million were to be held at Pfizer’s warehouse to guarantee that individuals vaccinated the first week would be able to get their second shot later to make protection fully effective. Finally, the government is holding an additional 500,000 doses as a reserve against unforeseen problems.
Pfizer said it remains confident it can deliver up to 50 million doses globally this year and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.
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Seems this is one of the stages of the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.
From the Associated Press:
The Army general in charge of getting COVID-19 vaccines across the United States apologized on Saturday for “miscommunication” with states over the number of doses to be delivered in the early stages of distribution.
"I failed. I'm adjusting. I am fixing and we will move forward from there," Gen. Gustave Perna told reporters in telephone briefing. Perna's remarks came a day after a second vaccine was added in the fight against COVID-19, which has killed more than 312,000 people in the U.S. Governors in more than a dozen states have said the federal government has told them that next week’s shipment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be less than originally projected. Perna acknowledged the criticism and accepted blame.
“I want to take personal responsibility for the miscommunication,” he said. “I know that’s not done much these days. ”But I am responsible. ... This is a Herculean effort and we are not perfect."
The general said he made mistakes by citing numbers of doses that he believed would be ready. “I am the one who approved forecast sheets. I'm the one who approved allocations,” Perna said. “There is no problem with the process. There is no problem with the Pfizer vaccine. There is no problem with the Moderna vaccine.”
Perna said the government now is on track to get approximately 20 million doses to states by the first week of January, a combination of the newly approved Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Perna said 2.9 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses have been delivered to states so far.
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I agree with the General, this is a Herculean effort, and think this is one of those things that happens in such a huge undertaking. There will probably be more hiccups along the way.
But those that are so ready to jump on the states to lay blame there and imply that the higher ups in this process are not responsible need to realize just what a huge undertaking this is and realize there will be bumps along the road and it doesn't do any good to jump to any conclusions until all information is out there and the involved parties actually work out what is happening or has happened.
At the end of the day, they have to figure out what happened with the states not receiving the anticipated number of doses, deal with it, and move forward.
* Freedom has a taste the protected will never know *
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