Covid Vaccine: This weekend, 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine are to begin traveling by plane and guarded truck from facilities in Michigan and Wisconsin to designated locations, mostly hospitals, in all 50 states.
The first injections are expected to be given by Monday to high-risk health care workers, the initial step toward the goal of inoculating enough Americans by spring to finally halt the spread of a virus that has killed nearly 300,000, sickened millions and upended the country’s economy, education system and daily life. There are now more than 16 million virus cases reported in the United States, according to a New York Times database.
The rapid development of the vaccine, and the F.D.A.’s emergency authorization of it on Friday night based on data showing it to be 95 percent effective, has been a triumph of medical science, but much in this complicated next stage could go wrong.
States say they have only a fraction of the funding they need from the federal government for staffing to administer the shot, for tracking who has received both doses of the vaccine — a booster is needed three weeks after the initial injection — and for other crucial pieces of the effort.
But for all the planning that has been done and contingencies that have been put in place in recent months, there is still a good deal of confusion. States are receiving initial allocations according to a federal formula based strictly on their adult population, but many hospitals say they still don’t know exactly how much they will get or when shipments will arrive. Some hospital systems are reeling from the news that their initial allocations will be much smaller than they had hoped.
One reason for the shortfall in initial supply is that federal officials decided to send out fewer than half of the 6.4 million doses they had planned for the first wave.
Although there is some variation among their plans, states are largely planning to follow recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about who gets vaccinated first: health care workers at high risk of exposure to the virus and residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities, a population that has died from the virus at disproportionately high rates.
On Thursday, as an F.D.A. advisory committee debated whether to recommend authorization of the Pfizer vaccine, the first packages of supplies to administer it — vaccination record cards, masks, visors, information sheets and syringes — arrived at UPMC Presbyterian, a hospital in Pittsburgh.
How Many Vaccine Doses Will Your State Get?
The New York Times surveyed all 50 states for their estimates of coronavirus vaccine doses they expect to receive before the end of the year.
— Abby Goodnough, Reed Abelson and Jan Hoffman The New York Times