Officials work to pinpoint doses in pipeline between federal distribution and administration by states
The Biden administration has spent its first week in office attempting to manually track down 20m vaccine doses in the pipeline between federal distribution and administration at clinic sites, when a dose finally reaches a patient’s arm.
The Trump administration’s strategy pushed the response to the coronavirus pandemic to individual states and omitted pipeline tracking information between distribution and when the shot is actually administered, Biden administration officials told Politico.
The lack of data has now forced federal health department officials to spend hours on the phone tracking down vaccine shipments, the news website reported.
“Nobody had a complete picture,” Dr Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice-president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told Politico. “The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”
As of Saturday, 49 million doses of vaccine have been distributed by the federal government, but only 27 million administered by states, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About two million of those doses are believed to be accounted for by a 72-hour lag in reported administration, Politico reported. That still leaves millions in the pipeline between delivery and patient. At least 16 states have used less than half the vaccine doses distributed to them, USA Today reported this week. …
A man has appeared in court after a suspicious package was sent to a coronavirus vaccine production plant in Wrexham, north Wales.
Staff were forced to evacuate from the Wockhardt site when the package arrived on Wednesday morning, and production at the facility ground to a halt while the package was investigated.
Kent police said it was “not a viable device”, but it appears to have been intended as an explosive.
Anthony Collins, 53, was charged with “dispatching an article by post with the intention of inducing the belief it is likely to explode or ignite”, a spokesman for the force said. The motive behind the incident remains unclear.
Collins, of Chatham Hill, Chatham, Kent, was arrested by officers on Thursday morning and remanded in custody. He appeared at Medway magistrates court on Saturday, according to police.
At the hearing, he was further remanded in custody and will appear at Maidstone crown court on 26 February. …
