The graph above illustrates the number of vaccinations as a percent of the population of the various countries. As you can see the U. S. isn’t doing too badly although Israel leads the pack.
That comports with an observation I’ve made here repeatedly—there are advantages in being a small, compact country with high social cohesion.
In terms of total vaccinations we’ve vaccinated the most people followed by China, followed by the European Union as a whole.
Graph and figures derived from here.
The DOD is looking at FEMA’s request for manpower, which could boost administration rates by up to 25% based on the numbers reported.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fema-pentagon-ready-10000-troops-covid-vaccination-sites/
After that there should be significant boost in supply from both non-mRNA and mRNA vaccines in April.
The open question into next fall is do we need booster shots for the variants and what’s the timeline for research, approvals, procurement, manufacturing, distribution, administration for that.
One step at a time through and the current step looks decent.
Time to announce the results of the non-bet bet. Two weeks ago Dave asked how long it would take Pfizer and Moderna to produce the next 20M doses. Based upon the most recent distribution rates, I said CDC should report 50,661,075 doses on Jan. 29th (Friday).
On Friday, CDC reported 49,216,500 doses, a shortfall of 1,444,575 doses.
Unfortunately, there are extenuating circumstances. On January 20th, CDC started counting doses distributed upon delivery instead of upon shipment. Assuming the average time btw/ shipping and delivery is a little over one day, that would explain the difference. OTOH on January 26th, CDC started counting a vial of Pfizer vaccine as 6 doses, up from 5 doses.
What stands out though is that vaccines distribution has come in three waves so far. Seven day rolling average for distribution:
Dec. 14th: Zero daily doses
Dec. 23rd: 1.2M daily doses
Dec. 30th: 420k daily doses
Jan. 13th: 1.7M daily doses
Jan. 19th: 495k daily doses
Jan. 26th: 1.9M daily doses
Seems kind of odd given two vaccines. Weekends?
The Dec 30th drop is easy to explain. Holidays. The Jan 19th is harder. I’m guessing weather. If that’s right there will be another sharp drop in the present week.
From the git go they told us months, maybe April. Why is this even news?
In my immediate area I think that we have solved the personnel issue for now. We could do a lot more if we had the vaccine. On Saturday at my vaccination site we quit at 3:00 PM since we only had enough vaccine to run that late. We could have easily run later. Our turnout rate was good. 266 out of 270 showed.
Weather and holidays are a factor. It also takes a lot longer to vaccinate old people.
We were told that starting this week we would have guaranteed, regular deliveries. Will see. To date deliveries have been sporadic so regular deliveries will help with planning, but we mostly need more vaccines.
Steve
“The DOD is looking at FEMA’s request for manpower, which could boost administration rates by up to 25% based on the numbers reported.”
So the request is for 10,000 troops for 100 vaccination sites – 50 with a capacity for 6k shots per day and 50 at 3k per day. So that would likely focus on large sites in urban areas.
For comparison, Colorado is currently doing around 15-20k a day.
The plan is still in the conop stage. This is a pretty huge caveat:
“Shots administered at these sites are expected to draw on the vaccine supply made available to individual states and territories, and some large cities, rather than relying on a new federal allocation stream. A lack of abundant vaccine supply will remain the most pressing problem, probably through March.”
In other words, vaccine would be diverted from existing sites to these, or shared in some other way.
We are already doing 3000/day. We need more vaccine and we can do more. If they pull our reservists it has the potential to slow us down.
Steve
Vaccine supply bottleneck is not solely due to Modern/Pfizer.
The FDA could choose to approve the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine today like the UK/EU have done. AstraZeneca has factories dedicated to its vaccine here in the US for US use and they are contracted to manufacture 300 million doses.