U.S. states, territories, pharmacies and community health centers will receive 27 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines next week, an increas...
U.S. states, territories, pharmacies and community health centers will receive 27 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines next week, an increase of about five million doses compared to this week's shipments, the White House said Tuesday.
Coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients informed governors on their weekly conference call that 23 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna and about four million of Johnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine will be shipped next week.
About 18 million of those shots will be given directly to states and jurisdictions to administer, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
Most of the remainder will go to the federal retail pharmacy program, with a smaller share to federally qualified community health centers.
US states, pharmacies and community health centers will get 27 million doses of coronavirus vaccines next week, White House officials told governors on a Friday call. That will include about four million doses of Johnson & Johnson's one-shot vaccine (pictured, file)
The Biden administration touted the three-fold increase in the number of doses shipping to states each week since the president on January 20
Although White House officials boasted that next week's shipments are triple the size weekly vaccine allocations were when President Biden took office, next week's increase is almost completely accounted for by the four million Johnson & Johnson doses.
And next week will be the first time since the initial shipment that states will receive a substantial number of the long-awaited one-dose shot, after the stockpile of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine fell short of promises made by the firm and the White House.
A total of 9,235,980 doses of Pfizer's vaccine and 6,659,000 of Moderna's were shipped to US states and territories this week.
States also received a small allocation of 389,900 doses of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine.
Together, these doses amount to 16,284,880 total vaccine doses allocated to US states and territories directly.
The rest of this week's approximately 21 million shots went to pharmacies and community health centers.
It comes after the US easily surpassed Biden's goal of getting 100 million shots in Americans' arms within the first 100 days of his presidency, hitting that benchmark within just 59 days of his term.
In fact, even without the anticipated increases in vaccine supply and daily shot administrations, if the U.S. vaccination campaign had continued at the pace it was going on Inauguration day, 97 million vaccines would have been given by April 28 - 100 days after Biden took office.
The administration expects supplies to continue to increase in the coming weeks, which comes as more states are relaxing eligibility criteria for shots.
More than 82.7 million people, or 24.9 percent of the U.S. population, have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 44.9 million people, or 13.5 percent of the population, have completed their vaccination.
Biden is directing all adults be eligible for vaccines nationwide by May 1, and the U.S. remains on track to have enough supply to cover all adults by the end of May.
The U.S. is now doing a seven-day rolling average of 2.5 million shots a day, including two million given on Monday.
Daily vaccinations have plateaued at about that rate since March 13.
But the number of shots being administered a day is up by 177 percent compared to the pace it was moving on Inauguration Day: 900,000 shots a day.
Pfizer and Moderna have pledged they will deliver 220 million doses of their coronavirus vaccines to the U.S. by the end of this month, collectively.
Each company actually increased its production goal for the end of March (though they both fell short of their earlier goals).
And prior to its authorization in late February, Johnson & Johnson had promised it could deliver 20 million doses of its one-shot vaccine by the end of March.
Combined, those 240 million doses would be enough to fully vaccinate 150 million Americans - about half of the adult population of the U.S. - with two doses of Moderna or Pfizer vaccine or one of J&J's, by the end of this month.
But shortly before its FDA authorization, J&J revealed that it would only have a few million doses ready to ship by the time it was expected to get the FDA's green light.
Now, Biden administration officials are expressing serious doubts that Johnson & Johnson will meet its 20 million doses goal.
That's despite the administration taking credit for using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to forge a partnership between Merck and Johnson & Johnson to manufacture more doses of the latter firm's vaccine.
'At this point in time, I don't want to commit to what's going to happen over the course of the coming week. We'll leave that to the company,' White House COVID-19 advisor Andy Slavitt, said during a Monday press briefing.
Johnson & Johnson told DailyMail.com that it is still on track to hit its goal, but White House officials told CNN Tuesday that they are not confident that the company will follow through.
Moderna and Pfizer are steadily continuing to churn out doses, but the short-fall of Johnson & Johnson's vaccines could mean stunted increase to the number of doses shipped to U.S. states in the the critical coming month as they expand eligibility to all adults.
And with AstraZeneca's data and safety monitoring board sounding the alarm over 'outdated' data in the interim results it posted from its U.S. vaccine trial, the 30 million doses it says will be ready to ship assuming FDA authorization next week could be delayed as well.
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